9' | Unlimited

The work of Beatrice Pediconi is charged with mystery and amazement, and the gesture she performs is no less capable of generation than attuned to capturing and accepting the unexpected: advance and retreat, action and perception. Her work bears witness to the possibility of another form of painting: painting that “mutates” not on the canvas, but in water, and with results that the artist can only partly control.

From the cycle of Subtle Bodies, texts written in ink of 2006, to the blue series of Untitled works of 2009, in which the artist made use of plaster and powders, and then to the Red works of 2011, where she carried out experiments with various organic materials, the artist’s encounter with the element of water—her immersion in the element of water—has continued to develop and grow ever more fertile. Her work aspires to couple the scientific observation of the behavior of materials and the capacity to reproduce them with a state of creative freedom in which the image is shifted onto planes of perception quite different from those to which traditional painting has accustomed us. Her praxis finds its basis in the fragility of vision and its transformation.

But it is also a kind of cocoon in which strands of images in movement unravel themselves along the walls of the room, moving off towards “the uncontainable,” and leading the viewer into other possible territories. One finds oneself afloat in a firmament of pigments and empty spaces that combine through sudden accelerations and de-accelerations into always different formal configurations, with images always “falling and rising” in a sidereal silence in which form becomes the vehicle of the music inherent in the universe.

The exhibition is accompanied by an artist’s book that captures the flow of images (polaroids and video stills) of the artist in dialog with three incisive interventions: a haiku by the Japanese poet Momoko Kuroda, a musical score by the Roman composer Lucio Gregoretti, and a mysteric chemical formula devised by Andrea Lerwill, a British engineer whose specialization lies in the sciences of conservation. These collaborations constitute true and proper linguistic interweavings in which poetry, music, chemistry and the visual arts reciprocally amplify the mystery of an act of exploration and contemplation.