Eight Autumns @ IAGA Contemporary Art - Cluj/Napoca
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- Pubblicato Mercoledì, 13 Dicembre 2023 20:48
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Francesco Fossati. Eight Autumns
curated by Camilla Remondina
IAGA Contemporary Art
Strada Cloşca n. 9-11, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
From Thursday 14 December 2023, to Saturday, January 20, 2024
Opening Thursday 14 December 2023 at 6.00 pm
IAGA Contemporary Art is glad to present the first solo exhibition signed by Francesco Fossati (1985, Carate Brianza, Italy) in the spaces of the gallery, with the title Eight Autumns. Quoting Camilla Remondina, the curator of the exhibition, that of Fossati: “It is a delicate work, it does not need to shout to convey to the viewer the urgency it wants to express. His constant research and approach to the topic of sustainability clearly shows how far his interest goes beyond current trends – although the historical moment obviously reflects it – and how sincere and deeply felt his attention is. His work reminds us that contemporary art will have to increasingly take environmental issues into account, including through materials and techniques.”
With these words, in October 2022, the curator of the exhibition described what emerged from the work Replica [Castagno] (2021) by Francesco Fossati, exhibited among the finalists of the thirteenth edition of the Combat Prize. These distinctive features convinced us to confirm, even once seen live at the Giovanni Fattori Museum in Livorno, the choice of the work and therefore of the artist to whom IAGA Contemporary Art was going to award the Galleria Prize. The prize consisted of a personal exhibition and that is why, more than a year after the awarding of the prize, we are happy to present the exhibition of Francesco Fossati: Eight Autumns in the spaces of IAGA Contemporary Art.
The project is intended to be a moment of synthesis and repayment of the Organic Pictures cycle, started eight years ago, of which the work proposed for the 2022 Combat Prize is a part. These are works on canvas made with the ecoprint technique: through a boiling process, the plant element - be it a leaf, a root, a vegetable or a berry - releases its pigments so that it permanently impresses on the canvas its shape, strings and details, sometimes decisively, sometimes more nuanced and evanescent. The organic material, therefore, is not used by the artist as a kind of stamp on which to apply colour, but becomes the only pictorial support.
The result is a series of compositions with mostly symmetrical patterns, obtained from the folds of the fabric required for immersion in water during the printing process, and geometric abstractions only apparently in contrast to the harmonious shapes of Nature: this coexistence, in fact, ideally embodies the proportions, the balance of the golden section that regulates all elements.
In Fossati’s work, ecological printing is not only limited to the way of execution, but also reflects this principle in the choice of organic fabric substrates, such as cotton and linen, including when the raw material is chosen, so as not to break its life cycle. In fact, the elements used are exclusively harvested almost before drying, sometimes even from the ground, in order to preserve the sap that is still inside them. In addition, they come from the careful organic cultivation pursued by the artist himself or from the streets and abandoned places of the city, where he makes trips in search of edible and spontaneous plants that manage to grow despite the excessive concreting made by man and symbolize the Nature that finds, reclaims its space.
While the food industry increasingly pursues a seasonal adjustment of products, especially of the plant origin products, Fossati, on the other hand, aims for a seasonality of art, respecting and being guided by natural cycles, reason for which some works can only be produced at certain times of the year. Thus, he reminds us of the times, not long ago, when the climate, the seasons and the alternation of day and night were what marked the lives of men. Following this path in his artistic research and not only, due to his sensitivity, the artist has chosen to position himself as a grateful guest in relation to Nature, and in every detail he always reconfirms the coherence and sincere involvement in environmental issues, for example through the skill to supply his workshop with sustainable energy sources.
For the success of the composition, careful guidance from the artist is necessary, but despite this, he considers himself to have a marginal role in the production, because he recognizes the gift and “magic” of Nature that knows how to turn into art and has always been itself a work of art. The same magic that occurs when unfolding, when revealing the canvas, when with surprise one discovers and examines the different shades of colour and details, some of them uncontrollable and unpredictable, permanently imprinted. Adding to this marvel is the wonder of how a plant can imprint a mark on canvas and release colours unimaginable from how it occurs in nature. The roles are thus reversed: Nature is the conscious author, the origin and the result, while Fossati becomes the instrument, or perhaps the means, of such an artistic operation.
Eight Autumns presents itself as a punctual project, intended to investigate precisely the declinations assumed so far by the Organic Pictures cycle, the refinement of the ecoprint technique and the thinking that underlies his most recent poetics. For these reasons, each year of production from 2016 to 2023, each autumn in fact, is represented by at least one work from the series, and the exhibition itself, as delicate and careful as its language, guides the analysis of the different facets of the work.
Francesco Fossati
Francesco Fossati (Carate Brianza, 1985) is a visual artist and wild plants forager. He lives and works in Lissone (Italy). In 2008 he got a BFA in Painting at Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan where he also got a MFA in Painting in 2010. Since 2015 he started making public artworks for parks and cities like: Parco Nord Milan, Parco delle Groane, Monaco, Trento, Carrara e Edolo. He took part in many solo and group exhibitions in various spaces all around Europe, such as: Mill of Pappas, Larissa (Greece, 2022); Spazio Hangar, Rome (Italy, 2021); Renata Fabbri, Milan (Italy, 2019); Magazzini, Palermo (Italy2019); Museo Santa Giulia, Brescia (Italy, 2017), MAC Museum of Contemporary Art, Lissone (Italy, 2013), Casa Testori, Novate Milanese (Italy, 2016), Das KloHäuschen, Munich (Germany, 2016). Some of his works have been exhibited in some museums and institutions among: Casa-museo Boschi Di Stefano, Milan (Italy); Careof, Milan; Kaiserliche Hofburg, Innsbruck (Germany); Museo Carlo Zauli, Faenza; GAMeC, Bergamo (Italy). In 2022 he’s been awarded with the Art Gallery by IAGA Contemporary Art, when he took part to the Combat Art Prize.
Camilla Remondina
Camilla Remondina, born in Brescia in 1995, is graduated from the Art Didactics course for Museums and she’s a specialist in Communication and Art Didactics at the Accademia di Belle Arti SantaGiulia in Brescia. She is an independent curator and collaborates with Ilaria Bignotti (Brescia, 1979) on many exhibition projects as well as the coordination of art installations for the walk entitled The Way of the Sisters (Or. Tit. La Via delle Sorelle) (main project of Bergamo Brescia Italian Capital of Culture 2023) of the event Meccaniche della Meraviglia (Brescia) and the project Una Generazione di Mezzo (Brescia). Since 2017 he has been in charge of the Scientific Secretariat of the Antonio Scaccabarozzi Archive (Milan).
IAGA Contemporary Art
IAGA Contemporary Art Gallery was founded in 2014, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in the Transylvanian region, by Alberto Perobelli, entrepreneur and collector of modern and contemporary art: starting from the acquisition of the works of the great masters of the Italian post-war period after the Second World War, through his activity in Romania, began to deepen the research and languages of young local artists and founded the project of a gallery to give voice to their works, in a careful and original dialogue with artists from other Eastern European countries, without forgetting the young Italians and the middle-aged. From 2014 until now, the result is an intense activity of the gallery, coordinated by Rosalba Di Pierro, Gallery Manager, hosting six exhibitions a year and with an active participation in art fairs in Northeast European countries, with a careful presence at Italian fairs.
The exhibition can be visited for free from Tuesday to Saturday, from 2.00 to 6.00 pm and by appointment.
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