ENTREXIT

Fresh! From the Fresco to the Contemporary and Back Again

Can the art of the past draw closer to those who contemplate it today? Can ancient art shed the guise that confines it to the past and don a new garment, fresh with meaning? These questions—and a long-standing familiarity with the Gallery of Frescoes in Villa Contarini—gave rise to the idea of this exhibition.

The Gallery consists of nine rooms, aligned one after another like pearls on a string, stretching over ninety meters in length, all frescoed from floor to ceiling—an immersion in seventeenth-century fresco painting. The idea for the exhibition emerged from a deep reflection on the fresco, considering both its tangible aspect, as wall painting, and the meaning of its presence as decoration within the Gallery.

The frescoing of the rooms took place in the second half of the seventeenth century, when Marco Contarini, then the owner of the Villa, commissioned the decoration from a local artist named Michele Primon. In the seventeenth century, Villa Contarini hosted, on the occasion of lavish festive banquets, the crème of Venetian and foreign nobility. It thus became necessary to create a space where guests could be received and entertained during the day.

The frescoes, which unfold continuously along the Gallery walls, were meant to serve precisely this purpose—providing visual entertainment as well as distraction and disorientation. The depiction of scenes from mythological tales, along with trompe-l’oeil illusions of endless skies on the ceilings or doors that open illusionistically onto landscapes of an ancient Arcadia, make this intent explicit. It was almost like a reverse cinema: the nobles’ walk along the Gallery brought movement to those fixed and static images painted on the walls.

The material aspect of fresco painting also played a crucial role in shaping the exhibition, which sought to create links and connections between different eras. The porosity of the surface, the layering of plaster of varying thickness, the techniques of cartoon or sinopia, and the alterations caused by later restorations—all these elements serve as grounds for investigation and connection between the ancient and the contemporary.

To suggest possible points of contact between past and present art, it was decided to place a contemporary artwork in each frescoed room. Some of the works were created site-specific, with the awareness that a work made specifically for the space could strengthen the intended relationship. In other cases, the works were chosen from the artists’ existing catalogues, deliberately, because the artists felt that those pieces addressed specific questions related to the theme of fresco.

However, the dialogue between the two realms—the ancient and the contemporary—implies a third element: the void. The artworks exhibited have been intentionally placed in empty spaces; the rooms have been cleared of the furniture that usually fills them. This third element is no accident. The contemplation of an artwork, the attentive and mindful listening to its forms or colors, requires a moment of pause—almost of suspension. The void, the elimination of physical obstacles, aims precisely at this. Just as a moment of silence enhances listening, or a blank page heralds the beginning of a text.

The exhibited works use various media: ceramics, video, poster, and ready-made objects. Each clarifies the meaning of its presence through its chosen technique, the material expression of the object, or the filmic image of the sign.

The first room of the Gallery hosts Francesca Sganzerla’s work Entrexit—a fusion of two words, “entry” and “exit.” This site-specific piece is a ready-made composed of a pair of shutters from an early twentieth-century home belonging to the artist’s ancestors. The work, standing before the viewer, is framed by the long sequence of windows that punctuate the Gallery’s length.

Sganzerla, inspired by the perspective play of the Gallery’s doors—each opening into the next—and by the superimposition of spatial planes, chose to create a piece that would serve as a “threshold among thresholds,” inviting reflection on the concepts of passage, crossing, and transcendence.

The shutters, modest in size, once belonged to a window of the artist’s family home. By re-presenting them detached from their original context, the artist seeks to intensify their functional meaning while also suggesting a new interpretation inspired by their present surroundings. As mentioned, these shutters come from her family’s house and thus are not ordinary objects but imbued with a specific emotional significance that the artist wishes to share.

Movement lives within the realm of space, for we commonly think of motion as the crossing of a place—but motion is also a characteristic of time. Houses passed down from father to son remain as witnesses of a lineage that has vanished, yet continues to live on in memory. Similarly, crossing a threshold is not merely a physical act of passing through but also a reconnection with a past that would no longer exist were it not for the places that preserve its memory (Viaggio Segreto, 2007).

However, Entrexit does not act as a nostalgic mentor clinging to a lost past. Rather, grounded in awareness of what has been, it seeks to emphasize—through the symbol of the threshold, the break, the hinge—the value of connection, of a mechanism that binds and makes intelligible, rather than dividing and fragmenting, thereby losing sight of the unity of reality.

In Orthodox liturgy, the royal doors mark the threshold of the iconostasis. Closed, they preserve the sanctity of the space; open, they allow access to it. Likewise, these shutters, standing at the entrance of the exhibition, trace a fluid boundary—receptive or rejecting, projecting outward or drawing inward. Opened and closed, they regulate the flow of entry and exit, the path of going and returning.

Elisabetta Corradin, 2008
Curator
P.A.S. – Experimental Art Platform