Curated by Valentina Costa.
Animal Stories is the first of two exhibitions curated by Valentina Costa for Citric gallery. The aim of these two exhibitions is to analyse the concepts of narration, story-telling, suggestion, and the way these are expressed either through the use of written or spoken words or expressed through images.
Formally the works by Erica Fenaroli and Davide Rivalta are very different, however their personal researches converge in this project which has at its focus the relation man has with animal; a complex relation translated in the discovery and awareness of oneself through forms of narration.
Erica Fenaroli (Brescia, 1974) explores the expressive potential offered by different artistic languages – story-telling, photography, origami, and drawing – by confronting them together around a central theme. The story presented at this event, The Frog Race, investigates what limits push man towards violence within and without of himself. The language used borrows a fairytale phrase and transforms it from play to tragedy, from energy to disappearance. The drawings offer a simple, clean line; this line does not intend to describe the objects but rather hint at them, leaving them suspended in the white space of the sheet. A silent, contained, subtle energy is perceivable also in the photographs which carry hinted titles in brackets. The subjects represented by the photos are removed from any context, almost materialising into images of pure thought, emerging through their intense simplicity from the background of a quiet melancholy.
The drawings, paintings and sculptures of Davide Rivalta (Bologna, 1974) are works of great impact – massive, physical – and yet delicate and extremely refined. Animals worked in bronze, gypsum or drawn directly onto a wall, like graffiti, claiming their own space, almost ready to break into movement and let out all their energy in an act that is not represented but has to be perceived from the posture of the animal, captured just before the action or attack. It is thus that Rivalta leaves space to freedom of interpretation. His work, though very realistic and technically very precise, is never quite finished; it always has something pending and requires almost a conflict with the public both visually as well as emotionally. In this case the story has not been written but simply hinted at so as to be continued by who feels the need to do so.