PISCINE D’INVENZIONE
Adriano La Licata
Curated by Agata Polizzi e Claudio Gulli
Piscine d’invenzione (Imaginary Pools) is Adriano La Licata’s first solo exhibition (1989) at Francesco Pantaleone’s art gallery. The title of this project recalls Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons, but in its genesis there is a reference to a book by Valentina Tanni, Exit Reality (Nero editions, 2023), which was recommended by Adriano. Here, the exploration of new creative possibilities offered by digital technologies is confronted with the increasingly strong trend to escape from reality or to define a new one – and we are already inside Adriano’s work.
For us, this immediately correlates with other readings – Adolf Loos’ Ornament and Crime – or with the casual, generous and intangible interferences caused by everyday life in the heart of Vucciria. The artist’s studio – a magical place by definition – is represented here in the first work of the exhibition. This auroral image, which almost precedes the creative process, is a passepartout: a photo describes what the environment looked like before – before the restoration, before coming into this world, before a regeneration performs the miracle of the genesis of a space of intervention and freedom.
There is sort of “drive to escape” originating almost forcefully from a contemporary situation of multiple viewpoints, details removed by reality to others from virtual reality, screens, distortions, glitches etc., elements and traces that define the imaginary in which the artist works. In an interview by Mario Bronzino, Adriano declared: “the artists who inspire me most are those with whom I share my artistic journey here in Palermo. It is the human relationships that develop in the artistic context that fuel my creativity.” This sense of community, made up of connections and daily exchanges, is perhaps a generational trait of people born in the 1980s, who are only now emerging and who observe the process as it unfolds and unravels.
For Adriano, this movement can generate errors, and that’s where you have to roll your eyes. Learning to watch what happens is the clearest indication that the artist offers us. But there is also a firm posture, a definition of identity that leads Adriano to remain essentially intact. He carries on with his research made up of memories, dissections, overlapping spaces, images that want to create confusion in order to reveal an often new, vital and explosive truth.
This is his imaginary pool. A place to dive in, but slightly scary – maybe someone is swimming with us, or not. Yet Adriano worked hard to earn this glimmer of freedom – we say it quietly, without any triumphalism. In fact he is always there, fallen to his side, stretched out while looking at us. Many of his works hide his gaze, more or less blatantly, but exposing himself is never self-referential. On the contrary, it generates complicity, doubts, and urges us to remain vigilant. Whose eyes are these? We crossed the threshold of the studio, that very significant limit for those who try to look critically at an artist, and then we tried to build a theater when we moved to the gallery.
It was therefore necessary to build other imaginary thresholds, with a framework that was meant to be humble, and with powerful, underlying implications. These devices are purposely dense artifacts, because they must function as crossing points between one world and another. Whether it’s a graph paper, a plaster, a welded open frame, glass, an elastic band, a fridge, the raw or “dirty” resulting material, everything supports a formal and conceptual authenticity that is not hidden behind conventions, behind the ripples of perfection. Now we are inside its space, other than the scientific-technological one, to which they would like us to be forcibly reduced. The action of making space is made of confident uncertainty, where the act of looking does not urge anybody to hurry and everybody is free to think, abolishing any precise rule, other than that of curiosity and knowledge.