A LULLABY
Riccardo Bellelli | Luca Campestri
Opening 22.06.2023
23.06.2023 > 21.07.2023
Suspended in time and space between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the works on display are bound together by a shared resistance to being defined. They take us to the threshold between staying and escaping from the condition of nostalgia, desolation, and de-mondification with which we must come to terms. A LULLABY is a liminal atmosphere, a state of drowsiness lulled by a distant sound that simultaneously encourages tenderness and disorientation. An emotional landscape on the edge between day and night unfolds on stage, where the images taken by Luca Campestri’s phototraps and Riccardo Bellelli’s “strange” encounters of objects, hybrids between the fantastic and the mainstream, activate our memory center giving us a sense of deja-vu, of intimate bewilderment.
A poetics of the remnant can be encountered in both artists: the things that remain from the warmth of a childhood memory and are saved from the erosion of the memory. Riccardo Bellelli’s creatures are the result of material disintegration, scraps from the desertification of reality. They are ironic ‘ready-made’, unloved objects that seem to have spontaneously aggregated, refusing to deteriorate and disappear. Luca Campestri’s photographic works, on the other hand, arise from interpolation. The night vision and the spectrogram alter the image causing a semantic loss, like time slowly fading our memories. Windows on the intimacy of the animal world, the images become ghosts, sub-presences, on the threshold between things that are not yet but whose effects precede their enactment.
The remnants of Riccardo Bellelli and Luca Campestri inhabit an ambivalent dream world, lulled in a persistent ambiguity. They are a soft shimmering dreamscape, and at the same time glimpses of a false awakening from which it is not possible to break out.
In order to tell whether or not we are inside this dream dimension suggested by the artists, you need to gather as many clues as possible. First of all, you must pay attention to the sharpness of the contours of objects, faces, or better yet, your own hands. Thus, the exhibition is completed with a pair of gloves, a work that when activated by the gallery staff challenges the audience to a mental game, which will allow them to figure out which side of the threshold they are on.
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Riccardo Bellelli (Carpi, 1999) works between Carpi (MO) and Bologna. He is currently attending the Painting – Visual Arts course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. He has taken part in several group exhibitions including Players at Mtn Museo Temporaneo Navile in 2022 and has created projects, installations and performances including Disintegrating Bluetooth on the occasion of ART CITY Bologna 2022. Among the residencies and workshops he participated in are Capital Project Colle Ameno at Sasso Marconi (BO) in 2021 and Un certo numero di cose at MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna in 2019. In 2020 he was a finalist in the 11th edition of the Combat Prize for the sculpture/installation section, and in 2022, in duo with Chiara Mecenero, he was the winner of the 8th edition of the Daolio Prize for Public Art.
Luca Campestri, Luca Campestri, an Italian-German, was born in Florence in 1999. After moving at a young age to the foothills of the Tuscan-Romagna Apennines, he settled in Bologna in 2018, where he completed his studies, attending courses in Art and Environment Decoration and Visual Arts Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, and where he currently lives and works. Campestri made his debut in the Bologna art scene by winning the Art Up prize of the Critics and Collectors promoted by the Zucchelli Foundation in 2021, the Zucchelli Prize 2022 and with a residency at the Alchemilla association. His research employs the media of video, photographic and sound installation focusing on the concept of the specter as a partial being: that which is no longer or not yet, but whose effects continue to perpetuate or precede enactment. So Campestri’s works often take the form of the imprint left by a disintegrating memory and stage affective places and dynamics of mnemonic and image disintegration.
