IAGA Contemporary Art is pleased to inaugurate Francesco Arecco’s new solo exhibition, an artist represented by the gallery for over a decade.

The exhibition, curated by Ilaria Bignotti, consists of seventeen works, including an environmental installation, fifteen sculptural works specially created for the 2024 exhibition, and one from 2020.
Born in Gavi, Piedmont, in 1977, where he lives and works, Francesco Arecco is a sculptor who primarily works with wood, his preferred material called upon to give life to a surprising sculptural alphabet that has emerged, with coherence and vitality for over fifteen years, sometimes from precious essences, carefully selected, sometimes from reclaimed elements.

In this exhibition, which sees an interesting presence of painting intervening on sculpture, key elements of Arecco’s poetics and found, such as the choice to intervene as minimally as possible on the material; the desire to highlight what is visible yet often forgotten or latent, primarily the constitution of wood itself and its fascinating possibilities; the pursuit of a poetics of small symbolic gestures (weaving, folding, embedding, splitting, supporting…) that become allegories of fundamental acts (loving, living, nourishing, resting…) entrusted to the personality of the vegetal and often mineral origin material (consider the use of stones grafted in wood); the conceptual work of unity and its ever-changing germination, where the principle of variation serves to divert reasoning, in a maieutic manner, from the fixity of the rule; the desire to establish a close relationship with the viewer, in a mutual gaze request that animates and energizes the work, making it an active participant in everyday life; the great awareness of space as a place of experience of time and of the relationship between people; the great awareness of space as a place of experience of time and of the relationship between people; the need to tell stories through objects, stories that often arise from an intimate matrix and become reflections on universal themes – the relationship between Man and Nature, between Individual and Community, the theme of Resilience as a bond between artists and the community.

These are the themes that become, as Ilaria Bignotti writes in the critical text in the catalog, “tools of a peremptory and rigorous work, translating into very clean forms, bordering on essentiality, often of environmental matrix or however linked to a very close relationship with space. […] large cycles of works necessary to define and address a problem, cycles that are never disjointed from each other but always aimed at highlighting the great, heroic role of sculpture as a paradigm of existence, honoring its ethics and reiterating, if necessary, the possibility, for art, to redeem humanity from denial, violence, pain.” In this broader context, the project of this exhibition, has, as the title clearly states, “Proximity”.

Curated by Ilaria Bignotti

An exhibition realized by IAGA Contemporary Art

Exhibition venue
IAGA Contemporary Art, Strada Cloşca 9-11, Cluj-Napoca, RO

Visiting hours
Tuesday –Saturday 2:00-6:00 pm, and by appointment

Period
May 16, 2024 – June 22, 2024

Opening
Thursday 16 May, 2024, from 6:00 pm

PRESS RELEASE