Maria Morganti
Diario cromatico / Colour Diary
Mariateresa Sartori
Il suono della lingua / The Sound of Language
Curated by Chiara Bertola
Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice
25 May – 14 September 2008
Opening
Saturday 24 May 2008 at 6 p.m.
Maria Morganti’s Diario cromatico and Mariateresa Sartori’s Il suono della lingua continue the Conservare il futuro project promoted by the Querini Stampalia Foundation and the Veneto Regional Government and centred on the relationship between ancient and contemporary art, between a past to be safeguarded and a future to be planned.
Diario cromatico
by Maria Morganti
Here are annotations written by the artist over the span of two years, from the summer of 2006 to the winter of 2008, after observing various paintings in the Foundation’s museum: she “experienced” the colours and then transferred them, as soon as she arrived in the studio, onto canvas. This is Maria Morganti’s project: simple yet rigorous and intense.
The artist has substituted five works, which had originally been placed over the doors of the museum, with five monochromes of the same size, painted to harmonise with the antique pictures. Each painting has its starting point in her constant frequentation of the rooms in the gallery, after which, each time, she took memories of a certain colour back with her to her studio.
This process can be seen at the upper edge of each canvas where the “history” of these layers is recorded by being coagulated into slender stripes of colour: the colour diary, the accumulation of experience.
The artist has also kept a parallel diary in which to note down, from time to time, all the sources of inspiration for her “painting from memory”. A dialogue between her and the colour which is offered to the viewers in order to involve them in the creative process.
As an appendix to the project is a series of photographs taken by Morganti in her studio and which portray, always from the same view point, the various layers of colour as they are built up; furthermore there is a series of silk-screens, experimental works created together with Fiorenzo Fallani. These show another, more chemical and contemporary, aspect of the colour resulting from her experiences in the Querini Stampalia.
Il suono della lingua
by Mariateresa Sartori
Each work by Mariateresa Sartori is an analytical passage aimed at breaking down the rigid boundaries which man has established for limiting knowledge and expression.
The project created for the Foundation inquires into the expressive possibilities of language from the point of view of rhythm, melody, and sonority. By leaving unchanged the typical ways of using a library, within the dictionary room with its open shelves the artist has placed books with earphones that allow the visitor/reader the experience of reading in their own language a significant poem, but one made unrecognisable from a semantic point of view because of the altered order of the consonants while the intonation and the metrical scansion is kept the same: the result is something completely incomprehensible but absurdly familiar.
The same method is used to re-elaborate poetry in eleven of the most widely spoken languages in the world by intervening on particularly representative poems from each of the chosen tongues.
The visitors are invited to see another room, this work both provokes and requires an intimate relationship with the listeners, who stand in the centre of a darkened space, concentrated and ready to listen as they would be for the reading of a poem. The sounds of language, detached from their semantic weight and revealed in their essence as sound, are in a way subtracted from time and space. The artist allows us to go back through hearing to something primary and forgotten: the pure and ancient sound of words.
Promoted by
Fondazione Querini Stampalia
Veneto Regional Government (an initiative financed in accordance with article 45 of the law 1/2004 for regional help for contemporary art)
With the support of
Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice
Exhibition period
from 25 May to 14 September 2008
Opening hours
From Tuesday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Sunday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Closed Monday
Catalogues
Edizioni Gli Ori, Prato
The programs of Fondazione Querini Stampalia are supported by
Comune di Venezia and Fondazione di Venezia
For information
Fondazione Querini Stampalia
Santa Maria Formosa,
Castello 5252, 30122 Venice
tel +39 041 2711411 fax +39 041 2711445
Press office
phone +39 041 2711441
fax +39 041 2711445
e-mail: ufficiostampa@querinistampalia.org
