Loris Cecchini
Leaps, gaps and overlapping diagrams
From 21 September 2024 to 31 March 2025
Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico – Museo del Settecento Veneziano
Curated by Luca Berta and Francesca Giubilei
In collaboration with Galleria Continua and VeniceArtFactory
The exhibition project at Ca’ Rezzonico presents ten new works by Loris Cecchini, whose artistic practice has centred on modularity for over 15 years. Using the various languages of architecture, design and engineering to explore the interstices and morphological processes defined by leaps, gaps and overlapping diagrams – hence the title of the project – Cecchini articulates a dialogue with the collections and architecture of the Museum’s three floors.
The starting point is the monumental climbing installations, protagonists of an intense interaction with the architecture of the exterior portego. Waterbones and Arborexence, proliferating in space from individual steel and aluminium units, molecular or vegetal structures that branch out, enveloping the architectural elements and becoming one with them.
On the first floor, in the Ballroom, the experience is one of vertigo: the dialogue unfolds between the large structures Otherworldly Winds, red narrative and black narrative (aeolian landforms on zigzag particles), works in moulded resin with rippling nylon velvet – evoking vibrant desert landscapes; the works of the Zigzags particles series, sculptural interventions of a granular nature, created with aluminium castings; the sumptuous and exuberant Baroque furniture made of ebony and boxwood by Andrea Brustolon; the extraordinary frescoes by Giambattista Crosato and Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna. Thanks to their illusive abilities, 18th-century painting and sculpture, together with Cecchini’s works, transport the visitor into a magical and surreal dimension.
Finally, on the second floor, between the rooms with Giandomenico Tiepolo’s frescoes and the portego with Canaletto’s views, there are some modular sculptural interventions, the wall work Wallwave vibration (Chorus Transition Probabilities), in which the artist imagines a sudden variation, a sonorous vibration, that provocatively dissolves the architectural surface, and a large telescope from the Zigzags particles series, facing the famous ‘tear’ of the fresco in Villa Tiepolo in Zianigo: Il mondo novo.
This last room, which concludes the exhibition, encapsulates Cecchini’s artistic discourse: the work as a tool for proposing a change of perspective and a reversal of the very concept of representation. In Il mondo novo (1791), Giandomenico Tiepolo depicts a crowd scene around the magic lantern house, an invention through which the audience represented here could imagine turning their gaze towards the exotic, towards the future, giving space to fantasy. Cecchini’s Telescope I, facing this emblematic fresco, reinforces the idea of the work of art as a device for breaking through reality.
A reference to ‘breaking through’ that, in the curators’ idea, also determines a further level of interaction and correspondence. When admiring the masterful frescoed ceilings by Tiepolo, Guarana, Crosato and Diziani, the theme of the cloud recurs, central to the opening up of spaces through painted skies, and it is here that we find the point of contact between the painters of the 18th century and the artist of today: the cloud as an intermediate unit, a transition between the real and the virtual, a formal element that corresponds to the idea of a modular sculpture that spreads organically and freely, adapting to the space itself and to the place.
Admission to the exhibition from 21 September 2024, with the Museum’s hours and ticket.
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IMAGE GALLERY: photo OKNOstudio