Paolo Icaro, Percorso neuronale, 2011, lead, 120 × 40 × 40 cm. Courtesy the artist

Sheila Hicks and Paolo Icaro

Live Wires

On December 19th, I was witness to a memorable event. Connected remotely from their respective cities – Paris, Pesaro and Brescia being the corners of a triangle – Sheila Hicks, Paolo Icaro and Massimo Minini discussed the show that this brief text aims to accompany.

At the start of the online meeting, the only details known to all were the title, Live Wires, and the invitation image, a steel blade draped in a bundle of coloured threads. This is how Massimo Minini had imagined the meeting between the two artists’ works: led by a visual and rational intuition, the gallerist had brought together Luogo della linea, the sculpture created by Icaro in 1969, and a colourful tangle of threads, an unmistakable reference to Hicks’ practice.

I cannot tell how long the meeting was – maybe a couple of hours? – but I clearly remember the exhilaration of those moments: Sheila, Paolo and Massimo’s faces framed by the squares of the videocall, the gestures, the visions and the shared questions formulated in English as a lingua franca, the wordplay, the attempts at mediation to channel the flow of thoughts arising from the meeting between artists and gallerist.

I was connected from Spoleto; as an enraptured and amused voyeur, I listened to Hicks, Icaro and Minini – in order of birth: 1934, 1936 and 1944 – three lighthearted youths toying with ideas, excited as they imagined the works to exhibit and the possible installations. It is thanks to this spontaneous and unique happening that I had the privilege of witnessing the birth of an exhibition.... read the rest of the article»

Live Wires has taken shape through something very similar to a game. It is no coincidence if the onset of this project brought to mind a ping-pong game, where the artists’ suggestions bounce back and forth from one end of the table to another.

Hicks and Icaro seem to play sports with few affinities: the former favouring soft materials, vibrant colours and a visceral representation of form; the latter creating works that are more overtly sculptural, with controlled chromatic vibrations and solid elements. Reducing the comparison to a contrast between a "feminine" and a "masculine" approach would however be an oversimplification.

Differences and affinities coexist clearly in the works on display. Both artists share a faith in the ductility of the artwork, conceived as an organism capable of change, hybridisation and reconfiguration over time. Both are attracted to tangled or accumulated forms, often realised with materials such as plaster, lead, textiles or found garments, far from any notion of preciousness.

In both practices, the exhibition space is treated as a constitutive element of the work. Whether in a museum, gallery or disused space, Hicks and Icaro react to the conditions of the context, emphasising its verticalities and dimensions so that the work generates space rather than being constrained by it.

Ultimately, Hicks and Icaro are artists with an unshakeable faith in process, in the relationships between works, places and human energy, following a logic of "doing, redoing, undoing" that rarely leads to definitive outcomes.

This is why they welcomed Minini’s invitation, whose visual intelligence lies behind this unprecedented double solo exhibition.

The text you are reading does not aim to be a slavish guide to the exhibition. The selection of works and the installation remain in flux, and last-minute interventions by the artists are not only possible but likely.

True to its title, Live Wires is an exhibition of intertwined threads and exposed connections, of resonance, vitality and play. In this sense, the childlike attitude shared by Hicks and Icaro becomes central to the project.

Saverio Verini