For autumn-winter, the mezzanine floor of Palazzo XNL hosts an exhibition that opens up the gap between contemporary art, the subject of XNL’s exhibitions, and the nearby Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery.
Sul Guardare brings two works from Ricci Oddi into the contemporary language of Massimo Grimaldi. This creates a confrontation that is both food for thought and a visual short-circuit.
Sul Guardare Atto 1 / Massimo Grimaldi
When: 23 September 2023 – 7 January 2024, Friday to Sunday 10.30 a.m. – 7.30 p.m.
Where: Via Santa Franca, 36
Like the previous projects, this one also takes its title from a book. On this occasion it is a text signed by John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972), still today a reference point for the relationship between art and popularisation.
Grimaldi, selected as the first author of the project, presents a wide selection of works testifying to the last ten years of his artistic career, reflecting the status of the image, its production and distribution in the digital age. AI, apps, artificial distortions intervene on images in a reflection that touches on themes such as portraiture, technology, programmed obsolescence, ranging as far as politics and activism. In the project, the selected works of the Ricci Oddi Gallery, very distant in terms of languages and dating, are at the centre of the public’s gaze and Grimaldi’s own works, transforming the rooms of XNL Piacenza into an elsewhere full of affinities and differences, of visual and sensorial effects.
