The non-existent is something that has breathed, even if invisible, that we have seen and that we have not known. If, by chance, we have known it, that is because we ourselves have been part of the non existent, or maybe because we are non existences.
The nonexistent, if seen, is painful.
And if it’s non-existent , what joy.
(Senza Senso, Francesco Lauretta)

z2o Sara Zanin Gallery is pleased to present the first solo show by Francesco Lauretta in our gallery. Non-existences is an exhibition made of phantoms, presences-absences that escape a definition but that are immediately recognizable.

The term phantom derives from Greek word phantàzo, meaning “to show”, thatis the idea of an apparition as a manifestation of an incorporeal presence, generally connected with the feeling of fear.

Life and death, the existent and non-existent, are the two blurred boundaries within the exhibition takes place.

The feeling of anxiety and bewilderment evoked by Francesco Lauretta work arises from the continuing apparition of the inexistent in the existent and the impossibility of separating the two. Reason falters when it is unable to name and define reality, when it is no longer possible to distinguish and classify reality; that is when you appeal to the non-existent to perceive and understand a phenomenon.

In the first room there is a reliquiary, halfway between a cradle and a coffin, a birth and a death. Inside there is a face, sleeping or dying, whilst the blue velvet covers the walls as a maternal skirt or a coffin’s lining.

The entrance to the exhibition queries the meaning of the figure. This Form indeed questions form itself, the answer to which remains elusive and intangible. (Francesco Lauretta)

In the second room there is a television tuned into a popular Italian channel, RAI2. On the surface of the screen, adhesive tape draws on the TV the figure of a face that overlaps the overproduction of the images. The tape is the one that the artist uses to catch excess paint while working. Everything that overflows is collected and stored in the close stripes, creating a tension that refers to something else, a trace of the inherent invisible that, though unseen, completes the work.

The tape disrupts the monoculture of television as Art, in the same way, escapes the circuits in which many would like to force it.

On the ceiling there is a red drawing, a cosmos in which the living and the dead appear together, where everything is in motion and continuously regenerated.

An ambiguity dominates the second room, temporal and spatial, or better, proprioceptive (Francesco Lauretta)

A spolvero, a landscape made of natural and almost invisible umber, surrounds the third room. Small tombstones point beyond the confines of the space towards the invisible, inviting us elsewhere.

A painting, shaped as a harpsichord decorated with flowers, presents a funeral cortège: it is Francesco Lauretta’s funeral. On the other side, on a red platform, a Muse performs. She is a body builder in a process of self-transformation. By re-enacting the ascetic, (non-religious) practices of the exercises the process builds up and strengthens the spontaneous forces that enable the individual to be himself.

The third room, if moved and in motion, is an exhibition that dissolves in poetry (Francesco Lauretta)