Lucia Veronesi (Mantua, 1976) lives and works in Venice. She is co-founder of Spazio Punch, Venice, where she served as artistic director from 2011 to 2015. She also collaborates with Yellow artists-run space and Atrii_Sezione Piani.
DESPITE THE THOUGHT
Fabrics, printed fabrics, plastic, sewing thread, straps, buckles, zips. Various dimensions.
Around one hundred sewing machines occupy part of the large factory floor. Above them run pipes, metal structures, suspended springs and silver tubing. Irons alternate with sewing machines and garment racks, where patterns hang alongside finished and unfinished garments. There is a rhythmic chaos, a disjointed lightness.
Despite the Thought emerged during an artist residency at Materia, within a garment manufacturing company that gave me access to materials and space in which to work.
The series of fabric works and sculptures grew from a simple desire to work with the lightness and freedom suggested by the space. It is an instinctive body of work: thought remains suspended, while making moves faster, overtaking it without asking too many questions.
Despite the Thought continues a body of work with textiles that began in 2019. The decision to work with fabric alongside my ongoing production of paper collages was a natural and necessary step, allowing the works to expand in scale and strengthening their relationship with space.
Lucia Veronesi & Paul Burn
ALL FROM TWO
ALL FROM TWO is a collaboration between Paul Burn (New York, 1978) and Lucia Veronesi (Mantua, 1976), established in 2019.
Their intuitive process develops through conversations and negotiations between divergent aesthetic positions. The resulting forms are carefully constructed hybrids, emerging from subconscious and playful improvisations.
During their residency at Materia, Lucia Veronesi and Paul Burn investigated the nature of generosity and philanthropy. They developed a series of signs based on simple hand gestures suggesting different forms of economic exchange.
Made using fabrics from the factory, the works recall both large-scale modernist painting and political banners.
The works form part of The One Percent For Art, a project in which each piece is intended to be exchanged for an amount corresponding to 1% of the buyer’s net worth. The donation is conceived as a means of supporting artistic practice while experimenting with an economic model not entirely bound by the dictates of capitalism.
MATTIA BERTOLO
Mattia Bertolo was born in Vicenza in 1992 and lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, graduating in 2017.
During the residency, Bertolo transformed his studio into a kind of survival camp.
His practice develops an interdisciplinary language that draws on vernacular architecture and major modernist movements, exploring a rapidly changing reality and the ways in which we seek to adapt and survive within it.
Giuseppe Fontana was born in Salemi in 1995. He studied Painting at the Academies of Fine Arts in Florence and Venice. He lives and works in Berlin, where his artistic research explores the relationships between working-class culture and painting.
During a four-month residency within Materia, Fontana produced 90 works on paper, later displayed on glass shelving and garment racks already present inside Confezioni Grazia.
The installation brings modular elements and transparency into dialogue, creating relationships that unfold not only visually and chromatically, but materially as well.
Observing the company’s entire production process and the different stages involved in constructing a garment, Fontana focused in particular on cutting.
The artist relates this space to the concept of “heterotopia” developed by French philosopher Michel Foucault: a heterogeneous and transitional space capable of interrupting the ordinary organization of the places we inhabit and becoming a space of relation.
For Materia, Fontana also draws on an image proposed by Foucault in 1966, in which life is described as a gridded, fragmented and varied space, crossed by areas of light and darkness, differences in level, steps, depressions and protrusions.
The exhibition was completed by a buffet conceived in visual dialogue with the installation and prepared by Angelisa Berta, a Confezioni Grazia employee who also took part in the development of the exhibition.