Loris Cecchini
Leaps, gaps and overlapping diagrams

From 20 September 2024 to March 2025
Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico – Museo del Settecento Veneziano

Curated by Luca Berta, Francesca Giubilei
With the support of Galleria Continua
In collaboration with VeniceArtFactory

The branching and proliferating sculptures, which today are a cornerstone of Loris Cecchini’s practice, derive from his first experiments with modular sculpture, conducted twenty years ago. It was the unprecedented calculating power of the new three-dimensional modelling tools at the time that enabled a quantum leap in the three-factor diagram, which has always underpinned his work: nature, science, art. The power of technology combined with modularity opened up new operating spaces towards achieving an ancient goal, expressed in Cecchini’s own words: “Finally trying to break the Euclidean box in sculpture”.

The exhibition at Ca’ Rezzonico presents a series of modular works that attempt to incorporate into their structure the potential interactions between the modules, and those between the modules and the expansion space determined by the external environment. In this sense they are constitutively and not episodically site-specific works, which are formed and function in relation to the context.

The placing of Cecchini’s sculptures in the rooms of Ca’ Rezzonico also determines a further level of interaction and correspondence. Admiring the masterly ceilings frescoed by Giambattista Tiepolo, Jacopo Guarana, Giovanni Battista Crosato and Gaspare Diziani, we perceive how intensely they project the urge to visually break through the architectural cage. Tiepolo’s clouds, shapes without form, volumes without mass, are at the same time the point of support for the figures peopling the sky, but also an instrument of connection that traverses the states of pictorial matter (the depicted sky, painted architectures and real architecture), like the Aristotelian spheres, until they join the viewers in the physical space and draw them upwards.

A shared eagerness to dismantle firmly established geometries inspires both the 18th century frescoes and Cecchini’s artistic practice. But whereas Tiepolo and his emulators proposed the illusory representation of a dazzling celestial space as a remedy, Cecchini works by subtraction with respect to the mimetic logic. Of course his installations can be reminiscent of mineral concretions, or vegetable proliferations. But what characterises them essentially is the elimination of the inside/outside threshold, the absence of a centre and the abolition of form understood as an intuitively comprehensible convexity, recognisable, assimilable to some geometric solid.

Cecchini seeks to extract the morphological structure, expose the morphogenetic process, stage the leaps and gaps of non-linear processes, to “celebrate the geometry of everything” without limitations, following multiple and unpredictable geometries. This significantly entails a sensible closeness to some expressions of Baroque and Rococo decoration, which radiates into every available space.

The works in the exhibition Leaps, gaps and overlapping diagrams consist to a significant extent of modular installations in steel and aluminium, both inside and outside the building. They are flanked by sculptural projects of a granular nature, created with aluminium casts from moulds consisting of polystyrene microspheres that can model any shape, while deteriorating its degree of definition, and works more similar to two-dimensionality, in moulded resin with nylon velvet, which evoke patterns traceable in nature on a microscopic and macroscopic scale. Discrete or continuous infinity, analogue or digital.

This is the conceptual spectrum that Loris Cecchini intends to explore in the exhibition project at Ca’ Rezzonico, entering into a relationship with the masterpieces of 18th-century culture preserved in it, without renouncing his choreographic instinct and aesthetic fascination as a lever for a tireless work of rethinking sculpture.

Admission to the exhibition from 20 September 2024, with the Museum’s hours and ticket.