Collettiva – Shine
Milan, 25 May – 29 July 2023
Ivan De Menis, Elisa Grezzani, David Lindberg
Shine
25 May – 29 July 2023
Milan
Corso Venezia 29, 20121 Milan, MI
Tuesday-Friday 11:00-13:00 / 15:00-19:00
Saturday 11:00-19:00
Opening, Thursday 25 May 2023, at 6:00 pm
“Shine and reflect. This explains, at least in its beginning, the widespread belief in the magical and sacred nature
of gold, precious stones and sparkling objects: their ability to capture light and return it to new life, to make it literally re-glow.”
Marino Niola, anthropologist
The exhibition Shine showcases the aniconic works of three artists, Ivan De Menis, Elisa Grezzani and David Lindberg, in which the abstraction of painting and the use of translucent materials become common denominators of a series of works rooted in colour as light.
In the works by Ivan De Menis (Treviso, 1973), a narrowing down of semantics goes hand in hand with the need to build a pictorial discourse on controlled, systematic foundations. De Menis works by processing pictorial matter, layering enamels, thickening resins, and blending unrelated materials such as bubble wrap and polystyrene with pigment. In some of his works, the artist offers a glimpse of successive painting phases through tones, chromatic passages, “drops” of colour, and the transparency of the glazing. In others, he freezes the pictorial matter with glowing glass-like effects, where the chromatic surface seems to synchronously suspend the temporal sequence of the painting gestures in a moment of an eternity epitomised by the brightness of colour.
The paintings by Elisa Grezzani (Bressanone, 1986) spring from a composition of levels, contrasts of colour and form that generate a play of tension on the pictorial surface. The artist tones down the textured nature of oils and acrylics with a layer of resin spread across the entire work. Its transparency creates a sense of depth amidst the underlying colours and enhances the play of light on the surface of the painting, creating an atmosphere of suspension that invites contemplation. The works on display attest to the artist’s desire to strike a balance between form and colour, in line with a concept of classicism centred on beauty as its pivotal theme. Grezzani’s work treads that fine line that separates the beautiful from the ugly, the harmonic from the dissonant, testing the limit where seemingly contrasting shapes and colours can reside side by side.
Pandering to chance in order to crystallise it in a work of art: this is the main intent of David Lindberg (Des Moines, USA, 1964). In the works on display, the American artist focuses on the movement of colour in resin. To this end he uses resin pigments and materials to guide its unpredictable flow as it slowly hardens. With each painting, he lays out splashes of colour on a wooden board and allows the pigment and resin to settle according to their differences in weight, viscosity and volume. The colours move for over four hours: this interaction between matter and time generates anarchically sinuous shapes and colours, in a patient display of revelations. Thus emerge fluid visions, organic worlds crystallised behind transparent flows of matter.