MARIE COOL FABIO BALDUCCI

Marie comes from northern France and the world of contemporary dance; Fabio comes from the province of Ancona and the visual arts and cinema. The two began working together in 1995, and over the years they have created a body of works that forms a continuum of actions, films, installations, sculptures and drawings.

Senza sole is a twilight exhibition. The large glazing of the first room in the gallery, normally transparent and in dialogue with the outside, has been completely covered by the artists with wood-effect adhesive plastic, of the sort found in stores trading in plastic goods for the home. Sometimes used to cover furniture and surfaces in need of renovation, in other cases applied in the spaces of offices in call centers, these contact sheets suggest situations of limited resources and questionable taste. At the same time, they darken the gallery, immersing it in a surreal, dim atmosphere in tones of brown/orange. With this installation and the series of works arrayed in the two rooms of the gallery, also partially in the offices, it becomes immediately clear that the show takes its cue from the space of the gallery itself, taken as a physical and architectural context, a living and active place of work, to stage several of the most typical reflections in the oeuvre of the two artists: the relationship with work and the workplace, the space and the position of each person, the relationship with time and the duration of things.

As Arnisa Zeqo reminds us, who has curated the exhibition together with the artists and written the text that accompanies it, ‘in an age of overconsumption Senza sole presents scarcity as if it were a sophistic spell or an act of divination. Stripped-down acts of reassessment, such as tracing the movement of the seconds hand on a clock, mirror various shortcomings in everyday life: a sense of defeat and shattered illusions are constantly replaced by new empty vocabularies, often consolatory neologisms. This unease that lives in the body is both ancient and futuristic. The conceptual and physical reassessment of reality becomes a sacred manifestation. This is a work that never ends, like an Eleusinian Mystery. Senza sole.’