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Artist: Sabrina Mezzaqui

GALLERIA CONTINUA presents the first exhibition in its Parisian gallery of the Italian artist Sabrina Mezzaqui. Born in Bologna in 1964, Sabrina Mezzaqui cultivates wonder and astonishment in the face of reality, through simple, sometimes intersecting practices, from stringing beads to cutting, reading, drawing.. – using different materials (paper, ceramics, metal or glass) and various media (video, drawing, or installations).

Through a reflective process of self-imposed discipline, Mezzaqui revitalises and expresses in images and concrete objects the essential detachment from words. The principle of distance, cultivated in the secret chambers of an intimacy that is reflected in his life choices and periods of isolation and “suspension”, resonates in a practice that is as meticulous as it is compulsive, where construction and deconstruction follow one another in an endless loop.

The title of the exhibition, Di punto in bianco, translates not only the motif of the dot and the colour white, two elements that are very present in Mezzaqui’s work, but also means “immediately”, “suddenly”, “without warning”, which could be translated into English as “out of the blue”. It also refers to the first goniometers, systems installed on a fixed support attached to a firing carriage (mortar, gun, or howitzer), used to orientate the carriage, in order to be able to reach its objective and mark the target.

For Mezzaqui, the time of creation is both a space of solitude that accompanies the act of inventing, and a space for sharing gestures to be made together, where the repetitive, domestic and silent actions that characterise her research – folding pages of notebooks and books, embroidering, knitting – define the meaning of the necessary encounter with the other. For example, the 2021 series Niente si perde, tutto affiora, featured in the exhibition, comprises sketchy, gilded frames in which fragile scraps of paper blossom in and out of the frame in leaves covered in scarlet dots, seemingly forming strange herbariums.

Closely linked to any possibility of relationship, language is at the centre of Sabrina Mezzaqui’s artistic practice, and often appears in her works, in its various forms: writing, short texts, memoirs, literary references, and reworked books, with interventions that unfold from page to page, through forms and images whose symbols are linked to the poetic, literary and philosophical content of the author with whom she is in dialogue. In Fils (2023), the artist presents an installation made up of works in various media, including a frame of cellulose letters, which takes up a quote from the philosopher Simone Weil and which connects with the screen printing of a thick forest of slender trees, whose dark silhouettes stand out against a white sky, like streams of ink on the pages of a book. The narration continues outside the frame with long black threads adorned with beads, which descend delicately from the ceiling and which are completed by the book from which the quotation seems to be taken. Determining an incursion into the deep essence of those authors who make up her emotional geography, the slow and patient exercise of copying is an important process in the artist’s pictorial language, taking on a spiritual dimension in the exploration of the thought of the other. For the artist, this operation, which allows her to identify fully with the processes and times of creation, materializes time and broadens thought.

With the collective work Bianco naturale, created during an artistic symposium in Italy, Sabrina Mezzaqui celebrates the simplicity of handicraft values and their elevation in a spiritual search, made of meticulous work and silence. Accompanied by black and white photographs by Paolo Carraro, the piece shows two days of work, during which the group created a 90-metre- long necklace, placed in a white container made of clay by Maria Cristina Navacchia, which becomes lighter and lighter until it disappears in the middle of a carpet made of marble dust.

What emerges from all his work, governed by the unwritten rules of a relationship to the world filtered through a literary and diaristic dimension (like a constant background sound), is the magical concreteness of doing and of a highly concentrated and iterative manuality, which is seductive in its meticulous adherence to the apparent simplicity of a sign (or a gesture) immersed in the temporal suspension of ritual. The artist exorcises the ineluctability imposed by outer, external rhythms while at the same time being an evocative reference to the “feeling” of memory.

The artist’s most recent solo exhibitions include: “La vulnerabiltà delle cose preziose”, Fondazione Luigi Rovati, Milan, “La capacità di cambiare con le circostanze” curated by Maura Pozzati, Fondazione del Monte in collaboration with GALLERIA CONTINUA, Oratorio San Filippo Neri, ART CITY Bologna (2021); “Terravecchia - Toccacieloscolora”, Una Boccata d’arte, curated by Lidia Berlingieri, Fondazione Elpis in collaboration with GALLERIA CONTINUA, Pisticci (MT); “La vulnerabilità delle cose preziose”, Tenuta dello Scompiglio, Vorno (2019); “Autobiografia del rosso”, GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano (2017); “La saggezza della neve”, GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano (2015) ; “Appeal to the meditators”, curated by Cristiana Colli and Mariella Utili, Galleria Nazionale Palazzo della Pilotta, Parma (2014); “The dormancy of the seed”, curated by Giorgio Guglielmino, Bengal Art Lounge, Dhaka (2011); “What spring does with the cherry trees”, GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano (2011); “La realtà non è forte”, Museo Civico, Modena (2010); “Equipaje de mano/ Hand luggage”, Istituto Italiano di Cultura - MOCA, Buenos Aires (2009); “Mettere a dimora”, GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano (2008); “Come acqua nell’acqua”, Castel Sant’Elmo, Naples (2007); “C’è un tempo”, curated by Elena Volpato, GAM, Turin (2006).