from December 3, 2016 to January 28, 2017
text by Valentina Bruschi
Beyond the Limit of the Horizon
A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies behind it.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1988
For his first personal exhibition at Galleria Francesco Pantaleone Arte Contemporanea, the artist has created a site-specific project encompassing the architectural space of the gallery in a large-scale installation. The exhibition is the result of Luca Pancrazzi’s longstanding relationship with the city of Palermo and the land of Sicily. The visual and sound artist Alexis de Girolamo has also participated in the project. He has succeeded in recording the sound emitted from Pancrazzi’s pencil as it draws a landscape. De Girolamo has created an original sound track from this sampling entitled Skyline – performed live during the inauguration of the exhibition – for a video by Pancrazzi projected at the entrance to the eighteenth-century Palazzo Di Napoli at the Quattro Canti (Four Corners), which hosts the gallery. This personal exhibition is an opportunity to reflect on the theme of the landscape and of our emotional involvement with it. It is the result of a patient experimentation of different techniques, from drawing to painting, from sculpture to video. The artist sets in motion processes of reduction of the figurative sign and of investigation into the nature of vision, highlighting new research opportunities focused on “detailed and interiorized observation as an interpretative code,” citing the artist’s own words.
The exhibition is introduced by a video entitled Mi disperdo e proseguo lasciandomi indietro un passo dopo l’altro – I lose myself and I continue leaving myself back one step after the other – whose soundtrack was played live by Alessio de Girolamo with whom Luca Pancrazzi formed last summer the group Agosto Insolito – Unusual August – during the now customary artist residency project Madeinfilandia in Pieve a Presciano. The artists share an interest in sound and in the search for the limit understood as horizon and as a way to overcome the pictorial gesture. Luca Pancrazzi has drawn a horizon on the gallery wall, with a very thin black pencil, at the height of the viewer’s eye because it is the viewer who must activate the work through his gaze. Humans are the measure of the surrounding landscape and the line that the artist draws as the horizon triggers an emotional process in the observer which is similar to the one proven when standing in front of a cut on the canvas by Lucio Fontana: it is a possible opening toward elsewhere, a third dimension beyond the limits imposed by two-dimensionality. The insights that we find in Alessio de Girolamo’s work, in his research on the limits of the chief systems through the use of sound, create three-dimensional environments. As de Girolamo says, “The concept of horizon is the metaphor of a challenge for thought, the stimulus to achieve a goal that is constantly changing. The sampled sound of the artist’s pencil is the sound track that I worked on and processed making it evolve into a climax rising out of the original sound and becoming an urban soundscape that vanishes into the limits of perception of ultrasounds.” This broad scope where open spaces resound is the countermelody of Luca Pancrazzi’s painstaking work. On the horizon line painted on the wall with an automatic gesture, the artist is continuing an almost opposite process that he calls “the limits of the picturesque,” seizing the smallest imperfections of the wall, the smallest mistakes or “accidents of the brush against the surface” that become buildings creating a skyline.
Luca Pancrazzi is presenting in Palermo a single installation composed of several cycles of works that were made using a variety of techniques and adapted to the size of the premises hosting them, a series of compositions in which he shapes his original intuition about the interaction between the self and the surrounding landscape: a large wall drawing with the same title as the video, a wall installation composed of a sequence of 24 ink on paper drawings, China Industriale (proseguo) – Industrial Ink (continued) dated 2016 and three maps of the series Senza Confine – Without Borders.
The maps in relief are “erased” by the white paint, losing any political reference. There are no borders anymore. The painting here is understood as a pro-active, constructive effort and the act of erasing offers a new opportunity to places. Two maps are inserted in a portion of the gallery wall so the paint on the wall becomes a painting and the shape of Italy together with Sicily vanish into a large white sea. There is no longer any border between the land and sea; everything is erased and anything can become something else in a subjective dimension of time and space.
The title of the exhibition, Dove Sempre Come Sai – Where Always As You Know – is taken from a watercolor on paper of 20161. Title and image: in words the artist evokes a specific and usual meeting place, as in a conversation between two people who know each other and have developed a habitual code of verbal communication, while the image refers to a landscape that is not recognizable and that can be anywhere, indeed, a non-place. The reference to the title of the famous book by Marc Augé is no coincidence, since the artist has focused his research on architectural iconography from the end of the eighties onward and established a direct dialogue with the French anthropologist for the catalogue of his 1996 exhibition at Galleria Emilio Mazzoli in Modena, All’ombra del tempo – In the Shadow of Time. In Italy, between the eighties and nineties, Luca Pancrazzi, together with Stefano Arienti, Amedeo Martegani, and Mario Dellavedova were among the leading figures of a new generation of creative artists who began working through delicate gestures establishing a genuinely Italian post-minimalism which has proven to be seminal also to the next generation of artists and especially those who have received their training in Milan. Alighiero Boetti is a widely-recognized master of this generation. Pancrazzi was an assistant of his in his youth until 1991. In particular, Pancrazzi and Arienti share a “decentralized” attitude, aimed at “slowly corroding, at revealing the congenital weakness that was hidden in the extroverted and confident images of the previous decade,” as Luca Cerizza writes in his essay on “levity in Italian art.”2
The images created by Luca Pancrazzi are invented landscapes, urban suburbs without any distinctive features and devoid of any human presence. The industrial buildings feature an accentuated geometry of their volumes and perspectives, as in a sort of ideal city of the Renaissance. It is as if time and space are suspended, not in a metaphysical evocation of De Chirico’s Squares of Italy, but because of their lack of content and memory. They are places that lead us to search for meaning as an antidote to the “daily loss”, as the artist explains. “The need to save oneself from being shipwrecked is replaced by the shipwreck of the soul which is lost and scattered across the landscape that is painted and recognized.”
