Galerie Rolando Anselmi is currently exhibiting UN MAKE ME - a solo show by British artist Fay Nicolson, curated by Domenico de Chirico.

Where the nine hundreds can be considered as the avant-garde century, the age-old motif of the mutual influence and interference between word and image on the one hand and figurative arts and literature on the other gains a new speci fic setup precisely with avant-gardist culture. That is also the topic behind the so-called ut pictura poesis, the Latin expression by the Roman poet Quinto Orazio Flacco which literally translates to: “as in painting so in poetry”— an across all disciplines-approach defined and advocated for centuries by artists and eloquence virtuosos.

Since the end of the 19th century, images have been manifesting a renewed radical independence and an unbidden value while their translatability into words has become an all-together more complex process. Images— as visual representations of reality in non-solid form— have, since then, made apparent an awareness that exceeded the boundaries of the real while fiddling with new peculiar, metaphysical and musical dimensions erring towards the unmistakably metaphorical. The avant-garde movements’ strategy has been active precisely in the direction of the elaboration of new aesthetic languages capable of isolating and articulating that metaphorical angle. The latter being the common foundation of both the pictorial image and of the written word—in the framework of literature—it becomes the starting ground to grasp and analyse differences and interrelations between the two languages. All the while maintaining an overarching interest in celebrating beauty as a pure form in an ideology redolent of the statements of art historian Bernard Berenson—who advocated the passage “from the observation of forms to that of a form”. A mise-en-scène of images takes place through a new language whose structure is made up of cultural and emotional strati fications in a succession of linguistic and pictorial images, where the latter lose their original/residual formal specificity.

Fay Nicolson theorizes a new formal code of Ars Poetica according to which, in an accurate yet totally personal way, “poetry is like a painting” or “a painting is like a piece of poetry”—with a firm focus on revealing the special nature of the pictorial sign. For ‘UN MAKE ME’ Nicolson has produced a series of large-scale works spanning from and around the idea of a making, moving, viewing and sensing body. In this exhibition Nicolson addresses Image as if it were a person, a living thing possessing a drive and consciousness of its own.

Fay Nicolson makes prints, paintings, objects and performances that explore learning through doing—tacit and explicit knowledge and tensions between image, surface and perception. Her works incorporate a set of visual motifs including: rippled surfaces; patterned fabrics; limbs; marks; type and gestures. Her compositions sit between the intuitive, fluid and painterly on the one hand and the choreographed, mediated and digital on the other.

Curated by Domenico de Chirico.

Fay Nicolson - UN MAKE ME
Galerie Rolando Anselmi, April 30 - June 15
www.rolandoanselmi.com