FRANCIS OFFMAN

An exhibition almost always begins with an implicit agreement, as the artist himself explains, with the audience that observes and the space that guarantees the presence of something to be recognized. In Più bianco del bianco Offman has chosen to suspend that guarantee. Not to negate the work, but to see what happens when the work does not immediately present itself.

I have removed the works from the first glance.

Not because they do not exist.Not because I stopped working.I removed them because I did not want to add another prompt response to a world already full of responses.

I have left two rooms almost empty.

Almost, because the emptiness is never empty. There is the air.There is the time we bring with us.There is the waiting to see something.

There is the aroma of the coffee.

The coffee is there, but it does not let itself be seen. It entersthe body as we breathe. It can be recognized, remembered or confused. It can make two people who do not know each other have a conversation. At times a shared doubt is more precise than a certainty.

I have left only what cannot be immediately possessed.

In the back, the whiteness seems to close the space. But the white closes nothing. It covers, reflects, absorbs, separates.It pretends to be one, while it contains many whites. It pretends to be innocent, while it decides what we can see.

I have called this exhibition “Whiter Than White.” It is an impossible phrase. I comes from another phrase: “More human than human.” In Blade Runner someone tries to measure empathy to decide who is human. I wonder what happens when we accept the idea that someone can measure whiteness, what is human, the boundary, the truth for us.

There is no test to pass.There is no right answer.There is nothing I want to explain until it becomes innocuous.

All I want is for the first glance not to also be the last one.

I would like absence to become a question.I would like the wall not to be immediately a wall.I want each of us to take responsibility for our own imagination.

This exhibition begins in the moment when what seems like nothing ceases to be sufficient.

– Francis Offman