EDDart presents a group exhibition bringing together artists from different generations around the idea of time. Time carefully recorded and time merely evoked; time fixed by the photographer’s craft or reworked through the continuous narrative of television; the suspended time of leisure and the time crystallized through the measured and skillful use of evocative objects.
Some works measure the passage of time through dates, numbers, and months, as in the case of Tano Festa: calendars that become solid objects or pieces of furniture in his works on paper from the early 1960s. Mario Schifano, on the other hand, turns to an agenda and drawing to visualize the year 1973. Both Festa and Schifano also employ photography, later painted over, in their celebrated emulsioned canvases: it is no coincidence that Piazza del Popolo is evoked in the former’s work, while the latter freezes time at “9:30 pm” or continues to search for “The Exact Time.”
The profession of the photographer is addressed in a sculpture by Mario Ceroli, which seems to observe—almost ideally—the works of Jeff Bark, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Franco Vimercati, Corrado Sassi, and Roberto Cavanna. Here too, artists of different ages and backgrounds are brought together by a shared effort to reflect on the use of photography and on the desire entrusted to this medium to “stop time.” And if, as Roland Barthes wrote, photography “does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and certainly what has been,” it is precisely around this possibility that some of the images in the exhibition are articulated. For Francesca Duscià, instead, it is painting alone that can think time—through familiar or mysterious symbols suggested by the history of art and by the study of physics.
Works by: Jeff Bark, Roberto Cavanna, Mario Ceroli, Francesca Duscià, Tano Festa, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Corrado Sassi, Mario Schifano, Franco Vimercati.