Di soglia in soglia
personale di Francesca Dondoglio
Paul Celan once spoke, in an unpublished poem from 1955, of a threshold word (Schwellenwort). A liminal word, poised between language and silence, presence and absence, transcendence and the sensible world. It is from such boundary words and experiences that Francesca Dondoglio’s solo exhibition develops, with a selection of works in which the artist begins to investigate the relationship between the idea of duality and the concept of the threshold, which has always been one of the most powerful and fascinating images that have animated philosophical and spiritual reflection throughout the history of thought.
The threshold represents a paradoxical place that simultaneously unites and divides, a hiatus that is both chasm and foothold for the gaze. It is limit, boundary, but at the same time a meeting place, a point of passage between two irreducible spaces, a critical place that represents the decisive moment of the translation of the possible into the event.
Dondoglio investigates this theme through the practice of painting, a symbolic activity par excellence that has the ability to throw into the field, holding them together, things that are in themselves different and apparently divided. The artist explores the relationship between matter, color and form resulting in a layered painting ascribable to an experiential expressionism of a conceptual nature. Surfaces, lines and signs give shape to devices of meaning that use chromaticity to bring to representation the archetypal and existential dimension of man.
A painting that creates in the points of contact new thresholds urging to meet in the everyday and ordinary each his own through a continuous capacity of allusion to the real that is not exhausted in the visible. Spatially, it is an attempt to break through the pictorial surface to stage that question that refers to another place and returns an idea of space that goes beyond the two-dimensional surface of the support.
As in the open field, a place of struggle and resonance, in her paintings two spatial regions are brought to lap each other, in that encounter, defined as a place of possibility or dark zone (or), which the author herself calls Via di mezzo. Making this opening stand out is a “dry,” sharp step, which asks the eye to make a “passage, which must always be a leap. “1 And here is the threshold, in front of which we feel little by little that we lose footing, the exact moment in which one is led to choose whether to put up resistance or enter something completely unknown, like a proposal for adventure. This is the place inhabited by the poet or artist in his poieticity, foremost among them Paul Celan who, with his poetic collection From Threshold to Threshold, suggests the title to the exhibition.
On show from 11 March to 15 April
Visits Tuesday from 2:30 to 7 p.m.
other days by appointment only
