Franco Guerzoni / Lorenzo Modica. Hidden in plain sight

Hidden in plain sight is a hypothesis of dialogue between two artists - Franco Guerzoni (Modena, 1948), who established a long relationship with G7, starting from 1973, and Lorenzo Modica (Rome, 1988), at the first exhibition in G7 gallery and takes place around some points of contact between their poetics: a common sensitivity for the image, for an image that enters the material folds of the work, emerging only through fragments and small clues; an image that never fully unfolds but manifests its potential only after a long preparation and construction of the supports, of the material life of the paintings.

Modica, for example, often uses fabrics and fabrics, whose patterns invite the artist to freely deposit stains and backgrounds, but also clippings and fragments of printed or photographic images, to define a kind of abstract landscape in which to place signs and traits which, syncopated and intermittent, appear as hypotheses of figures and things that can be traced back to reality.

Guerzoni, on the other hand, works through a long layering work that gives the work a strong material thickness, within which, ideally, the images end up hiding or revealing themselves as finds due to an excavation work (in the support) carried out. by the artist a posteriori, a process of subtraction and new additions of color and matter.

Both artists also broaden the boundaries of their pictorial process by incorporating heterogeneous techniques and materials and combining them together: in the case of Modica, collage and paper, often treated as a monotype to create images that multiply by recalling and relaunching each other; in the case of Guerzoni the fresco, but also the plaster, the glass, the photographic fragment and the paper that is crumpled, compressed or opened to reveal new images.

The exhibition has no chronological limits: inside Nascosto in bella vista there are some works by Guerzoni from the Spie series, created in the early Eighties, which belong to that period in which the artist exits from the research around the developed photography in the seventies and made his entry into painting. They are therefore transitional works, in which Guerzoni specifies his reflection on the material support, on the material background as a landscape of the figure: the image, in these works, coincides with small faces or fragments (in the form of photographic clippings and drawings) hidden and kept in the materiality of the work. Furthermore, there will be works of recent production by Guerzoni, works in the balance between painting and sculpture.