Luca Pancrazzi: FLASH LIGHT

Luca Pancrazzi: FLASH LIGHT extended through February 4, 2023.

TOTAH presents FLASH LIGHT, featuring new paintings by Luca Pancrazzi, on view from October 26, 2022 through February 4, 2023. This is Pancrazzi’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Luca Pancrazzi’s recent works are maps translating gradients of white, the empty origin of all color and presence, into porous landscapes. The vacancy of linen serves as a crux for epiphanic depictions of light. A discountenancing everydayness, equally austere and serene, shoots through Pancrazzi’s ghostlike visions of the airports, tunnels, and celestial bodies. Recreating these scenes at their most intensely luminous, viewers have to reassemble, and search out the subject for each work, which seems to withdraw from sight.

In the works titled Baluginante riflettente (Flickering), the viewer is perched in luminous air. The temporality of this lingering moment allows light to reveal itself as a narrative presence, a kind of apparition, that can only be described symbolically. In more abstract pieces like Komorebi, light’s intensity has shifted from a graduated dispersion, to an intense concentration whose purity confronts the viewer like a metaphysical alarm. The overarching theme of these works, airplanes and travel, alludes to the mythic origins of human consciousness: light borne in air, en route to a destination whose relationship to our inner being can only be expressed cosmologically.

For Pancrazzi, light takes on the sinuosity of a texture map. The legend that deciphers the contours and gradients embedded in the map is nothing less than emptiness itself, which feeds into light like its redoubled reflection. Like his mentor Alighiero Boetti, Pancrazzi’s paintings are vehicles for a more radical commentary on the state of vision in the contemporary world.

The specificity of each image—be it the sun, a body of water, or an overhead tunnel—is less important than the way each vista reveals itself a kind of proscenium of light, a clash of fullness and absence which cuts through the stability of appearances.

Luca Pancrazzi works in painting, drawing, photography, installation, and sculpture, as well as other media. A key collaborator in Alighiero Boetti’s studio for almost a decade, the multimedia artistry of Luca Pancrazzi is known for expressing an almost monochromatic stillness. He has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1997), the Triennale of New Delhi (1997), the Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion (1998), the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007), and the Rome Quadrennial (2008), and Villa Pacchiani (2020). Some of the public spaces that have hosted his work include PS1 Contemporary Art Center (1999), Galerie Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau (2001), Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts (2007), Pomodoro Foundation (2010), and the Siena Children’s Museum (2010). His work is included in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, The Goetz Collection Munich, GAM, Turin, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

For further information please contact info [​at​] davidtotah.com.