Only a few weeks to visit the solo show focused on the artistic practice of Enrica Borghi at Castello Visconteo in Novara, newly renovated. Interesting occasion also because for the first time in its history Castello Visconteo devotes a personal show to a woman and always for the first time it devotes a show to a living artist. A great opportunity therefore to see the evolution of the artistic career of Enrica Borghi begun thirty years ago and here very well represented by "historical" works showed with many unpublished works.
Born near Verbania, Italy and living on the hills of the Lake of Orta Enrica Borghi has by now an important artistic curriculum including different personal shows in the international scene: Castello di Rivoli, Galleria d’arte moderna in Bologna, MAMAC in Nice, Musee de Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, Estorick Collection in London, etc. Polyhedral artist she made the transformation the peculiarity of her artistic search: “I want to talk about the seduction of waste, the alchemical possibility of transformation."
Enrica Borghi’s world begins where our world ends. Her creative act is all focused on the concept of transformation in a broad sense, and it has its incipit in the recovery and re-use of materials coming from the domestic and female environment; materials that our society rejects and discards and that are therefore superfluous, no longer useful in a sick society that is never satisfied with what it has, but wants to get more and more, that wants to always get something different and for this reason discards easily following the next desire that it will have the same fate in an incessant path towards a goal that has its reason for being in its unattainability. Enrica Borghi starts from here, transforming waste into artworks creating beauty and vitality from what was destined to oblivion, to death. And the theme of waste, even human waste, think about Bauman's thesis, is one of the most current and characterizing themes of our society: "a ghost wanders among the inhabitants of the liquid-modern world and among all their labors and creations: the ghost of the exuberant. Liquid modernity is a civilization of access, redundancy, and waste" (Z. Bauman, Wasted Lives, 2004.)
On show the tapestries, the warp of which is created starting from strips obtained from plastic bags, Venuses and busts covered with false nails, rags and metallic scourges, jellyfish created by the necks of plastic bottles, mosaics obtained with the bottoms of bottles of plastic, gigantic clothes created with plastic bottles but also large-format photographs and unique pieces where the luminous element plays among the shimmering reflections of the plastic surfaces taking the place of the finest glass.
Enrica Borghi collects the rubble, the remains of a world in crisis, wrapped around itself and tries to generate a new one by changing the point of view with which we look at the world. ECHO. Works by Enrica Borghi is a journey in the name of wonder, that is, "of the amazement aroused by a new unexpected or extraordinary thing or situation", an amazement that, as for ancient philosophy, is synonymous with philosophizing, questioning, and therefore reflecting to become aware, to change, to transform.