Imprese (‘Enterprises’) is an exhibition featuring two voices, those of the visual artists Marie Denis and Michele Spanghero. Imprese is the hosting venue for installations that inhabit the space of Alberta Pane gallery in a silent and intertwined dialogue in the case of Denis, in a whispered and horizontal one in that of Spanghero.
Imprese is the meeting point between Giovanardi and Lunardelli, who have contributed and are continuing to contribute to Art through the productive muscle of making and realizing the Work, intended as a truly powerful and independent enterprise of genius and talent.
Marie Denis displays a sensitive, mutated and evolving nature, liable to interpretation and new meanings.
The ‘politics of beauty’ of Aristotelian memory fnds in the frst charming installation, Nel Wunderkammer, placed on reams of wrapping paper and realized in collaboration with Giovanar di, the enchantment and the annihilation of the barriers raised by the natural and the artifcial. It is a question of entering, with these intense and changing works, into the fascinating feld of an organic and fantastic herbarium that eludes entropic destiny with idea, talent and manufacturing knowledge combined with technical and technological expertise.
Marie Denis' installation uncovers graphite ferns, giant coconut leaves made of curved and painted mat black metal sheet, galvanized copper foliage, lotuses that have become matrix for magnifcent serigraphs enriched with veining.
Denis demystifes, catalogues and invokes all the senses, eliminating the distances between similar and likely by secularizing what her artistic hand and technical skill touch and transform. A visionary narration of other worlds unfolds in Denis' two videos (Les Masque(s) and Après Beyrouth), which run continuously in the small, darkened room of the gallery. The spectator's experience continues with the sound sculpture by Michele Spanghero made in collaboration with Lunardelli.
Tuned Volume is a modular spherical wooden structure that reproduces the harmonic frequencies of the acoustic stationary waves of the room in which it is exhibited. The massive presence of the sculpture thus transforms the spatial perception, but it is also in harmonious relationship with the surrounding space through sound waves tuned to the frequencies of the gallery’s space. The sound therefore correlates the architectural and acoustic properties of the venue with the volume of the sculpture and the resonant mass.
Going on, a table displays a selection of Denis' prints, to be examined and handled with care as a botanical cataloguer; once again, visitors are invited to explore the secrets of this delicate and intense artist, who proposes a suspension of time through the mineral patina of graphite that denies the usually fragile features of the vegetal kingdom.
On the walls a shelf of metal and wood, built by artist's hand, displays the prototype of Spanghero's sound capsule, a nest of gentle noise built, like many of the works of this transversal artist on the ratios of the golden section. His photographs in the series Studies on the Density of White seem to embody the dialogue between silence and sound, between tone and tone, thanks to an artistic eye that captures silent white corners with an absolutely disruptive visual power beneath them The enterprises displayed in the gallery, and which develop in the intertwined time and space sequence, experience both failures and multiplications, descending trajectories as well as amplifcations.
With these enterprises Marie Denis and Michele Spanghero project us into the experiential feld of Art in which it is necessary to listen and look, just as it is equally necessary to immerse oneself in one's own private enterprise of listening and looking at oneself.
Marie Denis' work focuses mainly on the object and how it can be reinvented. Her installations and sculptures are inspired by botany, which the artist reinterprets through diferent media, creating artworks in which universal and everyday life elements harmoniously coexist Afer studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lyon, Marie Denis won the residency at Villa Medici in Rome in 1999.
A selection of recent solo and group exhibitions include: Métamorphoses du quotidien, at the Maison des Arts Plastiques Rosa Bonheur (Chevilly-Larue, 2020); Le Saule qui chante, Parc Vansteenkiste, (Roncq, 2019); L'Été photographique de Lectoure, Centre d'art et de photographie de Lectoure (2019); Nature des Profondeurs, solo exhibition at Alberta Pane Gallery (Paris, 2018); L'impermanence at the Fernet-Branca Foundation (Alsace, 2018); De fls ou de fbres at CAC de Meymac (2018); Le Désir, Alberta Pane Gallery (Venice, 2017); L'Herbier de Curiosités at the Centre d'Art et de Nature, Chaumont sur Loire (2017); She also won numerous national and international awards and scholarships, such as the FNAGP (Fondation National des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques, 2015) DRAC Ile de France (2011 and 2005) and the above-mentioned artistic residency program at Villa Medici in Rome.
Michele Spanghero's works combine sound and visual arts with an in-depth conceptual research and are defned by a transversal approach and an essential aesthetic. The creative impulse arises for the artist as a reaction to the enormous amount of data that surrounds us. He tries to stimulate the engagement of the audience by subtly altering their perception.
The artist states: "Silence, acoustic resonance and imperceptible variations of sound in space and mater are the core of my sound practice. I investigate the relationship between space and perception through photography, sculpture and sound".
He has exhibited in many international contexts, including recently: Le Centquatre (Paris 2019) Eufònic Festival (Ulldecona 2019), Casa d'Arte Futurista Depero (Rovereto 2019), Cinema Modernissimo (Bologna 2019), Castello di Miramare (Trieste 2018), Jardin des Tuileries (FIAC Hors les Murs, Paris 2018), Hyundai Motorstudio (Beijing 2018), Palazzo Te (Mantua 2017), School of the Art Institute (Chicago 2017), Ars Electronica festival (Linz 2017), Museum of Modern Art (Istanbul 2016), Museo Rivoltella (Trieste 2016), Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome 2016, MAC (Lissone 2014), MART (Trento and Rovereto 2013).