z2o Sara Zanin Gallery is pleased to present Nude, the third solo show of Beatrice Pediconi, curated by Cecilia Canziani.

Pediconi (b. Rome, 1972; lives and works in New York) is a multimedia artist whose research has, for years, been linked to an interdisciplinary practice that departs from traditional mediums in order to arrive at unprecedented formal and expressive methodologies. In Nude, which signals the artist’s return to Italy after five years, Pediconi presents a preview of a large body of work that reflects on the principles of photography and emerges from its deconstruction.

Untitled, the series of work I am presenting, is the result of a drawing process meant to physically express loss. These drawings are the result of a migration, and their volatile and minimal traces are the sole witnesses to a story. They represent an irreversible transformation. The process of manipulating a material that is used to impress photo paper is an operation that interrogates how our past is mediated, transformed, and often ruined. By recycling these strips of Polaroid emulsion to create drawings on paper, I explore the degradation of memory and the corruption of our past. Drawing becomes the medium to seal our inevitable losses.

(BP)

With Untitled, Pediconi opens her research to an investigation of symbols and signs. Her series of drawings on paper is created through an emulsion lift technique, which involves extracting strips of photographic emulsion from previously realized works. Using brushes or her own hands, the artist moves the detached emulsion—which, at this point in the process, takes on the consistency of a thin veil of silk — and then positions it on the paper in a full basin of water.

This primary element becomes the means by which Pediconi captures the flow of symbolic images that originate from her gesture, which creates an impression on the paper. These same signs — markers of an empty space — become testaments to a trace, to memories of a past that has since been transformed. They hold an intimate account in which those memories, laid bare, welcome the vestiges of an existence that reveals itself in all its fragility.

Loss, mutation, fragment, trace: the works presented in this exhibition tell the story of a journey — both personal and collective — in which the ineffability of memory and of the past brings us back to the most essential elements. The works, like articulations of a gesture, describe movement and its elusiveness. Pediconi suspends motion, occurring at a particular moment in time, in an unpredictable limbo that brings reminders from the past back to the observer in a flash.