Bianco is a collective of 6 artists: Lorenzo Perrone (Italian), Alexandra Valenti (Italian), Simone D’Auria (Italian), Erika Calesini (Italian), Umberto Ciceri (Italian), and Melita Osheowitz (American). These artists’ styles are marked in this exhibition by their use of the absence of color to evoke reflection on our own lives.

Each artist employs different techniques. Using books, plaster, glue, acrylic paint, and other media, Lorenzo Perrone transforms a book, and it acquires an accentuated symbolism wherein tactile and sensory suggestions are heightened. The language becomes that of surfaces, folds, volumes, emptiness, fullness, and positive/negative spaces that transform a book into a sculpture. Perrone uses white for its ability to command attention. He believes that, in the end, freed from the weight of words, the pages become symbols, and the “libro bianco” gains eloquence and calls silently for a different reading.

“The meaning of color has always been very important in life. White represents purity, innocence, and decency. White represents spirituality,” writes Galleria Ca’ d’Oro partner Gloria Porcella in her curatorial statement for the New York exhibition BIANCO/WHITE.

Alexandra Valenti and her girl on the Swing is like an imaginative journey where the eye, instead of recording images, perceives them poetically. The artist’s visions are distinct. They tap into the suggestive power of absence within works that relies as much on what can be seen as what cannot. Simone D’Auria actually operates in all disciplines of design, creating projects for industrial design, graphic design, publishing, art direction, architecture and interiors. For this show, he has created a large spoon coated with egg shells and a marble tank inspired by the one in the game Risk.

Erika Calesini, the daughter of a blacksmith and a former fashion designer, transforms iron, rubber, and other recycled industrial materials into found object sculptures. A recurring motif in her work is the bicycle, which she considers a timeless symbol of freedom and physical evidence that lightness and circularity can coexist. The artist disassembles and reassembles abandoned bikes and their component parts, giving them new lives as lamps, furniture, canvases, and other sculptural forms. For this show she has created a Lamp with a Bicycle painted in white.

Umberto Ciceri uses lenses as a kinetic medium, “moving” in antithesis to immobility acquires an existential meaning: regeneration against stasis. The shifted motion of the spectators is thus the motion of the works in which they are reflected. His two lenticular Ballerinas enhance the wonder and the hidden drama behind every provisional state of harmony.

Melita Osheowitz’s Untitled series is inspired by nature and the artist’s increasing curiosity to work with the materials as a joint effort to create the end result. She starts with a vision and direction, but allows the materials to do what they naturally desire to do. She transforms materials that are traditionally used two-dimensionally into three-dimensional pieces infused with life and movement.