Falsità in buona coscienza

aA29 Project Room Milano is pleased to present Matilde Sambo’s first solo exhibition Falsità in buona coscienza.

The artist’s recent research, and in particular the project developed for the present exhibition, is to be considered from the point of view of the topic of the limit, or rather, from its cancellation and blurriness. Binary pairs of seemingly opposite concepts are shown, in Sambo’s work, as a continuum, and the boundaries between them become labile.

The exhibition presents a series of works that question, through simple strategies of intervention or overlapping, the separation, to begin with, between nature and artifice: shells modified in an almost imperceptible way, or strands of hair, wax and thorns that form small compositions that the artist distributes around the gallery, often installing them in places that are difficult to access for the viewer's gaze. In addition to this set of works, there are some sculptures belonging to the series Cantus ab aestu, which Sambo realises using cicadas moults found on trees as casts.

The irrelevance of the visibility of the object, or at least of its permanent visibility, is also to be found in the second series of works on display La material non è mai al suo posto (Matter is never in its place): it consists in "fake" relics exhibited in four reliquaries—modelled by the artist and cast by Fonderia Artistica Battaglia—which contain stalactites found in a cave. The relic in this case alludes to a continuous cycle, to a kind of closed loop in which artificial and natural, sacred and profane, true and false are reversed and mixed until they become indistinguishable. Thus, the cave takes the place of the profaned temple in which the relic was found, the stalactite, which in turn, when exhibited becomes artifice.

Finally, Omeostasi, belonging to the Untitled-Monitors and Materials series, consists of a video installation on two monitors in which the artist documents a session of "manipulation". In one of the monitors the gaze is focused on the masseur's hands, in the other on the patient's reactions, which passes from intense laughter to anguished crying. This work therefore also raises questions about the act of believing, not as a religious element as is the case of the relic, but in a kind of therapy that in Western culture is considered "alternative" and not scientific, and at the same time puts the accent on the unclear limit between joy and suffering. The work also considers the transformation of the hands from limbs that human animals have in common with other species, to tools that distinguish us, perhaps, from non-human animals. Matilde Sambo's first solo exhibition invites us, then, to rethink the world, or at least part of it, in cyclical and non-contradictory terms.