Pietro Gaglianò, Temporary Maps, 2014
Campo Visivo [Visual Field] explores the horizon of the gaze, and at every turn asks itself about the possibility fermenting beyond that very horizon. The inquiry does not stop at defining the boundary, but tests its friability as a hermeneutic value, highlights the specious nature of its presence, and expands its bond to the two knowable expanses lying on either side of the uncertain line the boundary traces. All of this through a flat exchange of verbal and visual information.The visual field is the one outlined by the edge of certain photographic images that gave rise to the process of interpretation (whose content matters above all for the complexity holding together the simulacrum with the story that brought it into the two artists' hands); the visual field is also the one branching out in fractals from the descriptions and revisions spread across the walls of the exhibition space: a succession of stages, ordered by the alternation of texts and watercolor paintings, which at times retain nothing at all of the original image, but which are nonetheless part of that photo — a now-necessary evolution, from the moment they exist and declare the multiplying possibility of vision; the visual field, again, is a map, a constellation, and is a temporary synthesis of bonds between the people who took part in shaping it.
The many authors (and vectors) of this journey into the image as metalanguage were artists, students, travelers. The project was conceived expressly for this exhibition and was addressed to the students and staff of SRISA, extending to involve a substantial number of young artists active in Florence, as well as the participation of friends, scholars and established artists. Each was asked to write a short descriptive comment on a watercolor, or to paint a watercolor illustrating a text that had been given to them. Each time without coming into contact with the previous steps, unaware of how many transits the object of their interpretation had already passed through.
Something subterranean at times runs through several steps, and resurfaces unexpectedly, in an arcane recurrence. Something else is lost immediately, or reveals from the outset a hidden truth of its own that contradicts its simple form. Every emergence is an apparition, and every crossing contains a phenomenon — literally — a manifestation charged with meaning, the symptom of a presence declaring itself in the secular parousia of color, form and word.
Bianco-Valente's works are always born as the synthesis of a questioning process, radiating outward from the authors to involve various interlocutors, space, the tools of representation, and the devices of identification and recognition of belonging. By virtue of this vocation, all of their works, even the most formally finished ones, retain the profile of the layering that created them, and allow one to read the complexity of gazes and actions that took part in their composition. Whether it is a matter of maps, of visual and verbal narratives, of physical interventions on architecture and landscape, Bianco-Valente act by following a meticulous path of rewriting, beneath the skin of things and well beyond their surface.
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Text written on the occasion of the exhibition by Bianco-Valente, Campo visivo, SRISA Gallery of Contemporary Art (Santa Reparata International School of Art), Florence, January 30 - March 10, 2014