'Under Over Through' at RITA URSO Artopia Gallery, Milan

As French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty might have described it, “UNDER OVER THROUGH” sets out to stimulate a reflection on the concept of perception understood not as the result of a series of random sensations but rather as an active dimension, the original opening up to the world of living, an exclusively qualitative act that manifests itself in relation to the Lebenswelt itself. Merleau-Ponty developed the theory according to which “all consciousness is perceptual”, emphasizing that ontology must be reconceived in light of the primacy of perception. Thus, based on a study of perception, Merleau-Ponty reached the conclusion that the body is not only a thing, a potential object of scientific study, but it is also the necessary condition of experience: the body, in other words, is the site of perceiving and knowing the world. UNDER OVER THROUGH seeks to analyze these activities that go beyond the organic level; what is referred to is not the material texture of the works in a scientific sense or even their auras, but rather the work itself understood as a field of emanation that opens up a series of dynamic possibilities. It is above all an exploration of the development of a sense, which, constantly enriching itself, takes on a perspective that weaves itself under, over, and through. This sense and its continuous wandering actually have a single point of emanation, despite inhabiting a more extended mobile state. UNDER OVER THROUGH also explores the theme of becoming as the change, movement, and endless flowing of the real, a perennial rebirth of things in which both static and dynamic ontological visions are juxtaposed and which causes a change in space and time. The movement is at times sinuous and silent, and at others volatile or in a phase or preparation, as though it were an implosion that becomes visible to the external gaze.

It is in this way that every work in the show answers to a different dynamic level, some works have already been traversed while others are ready to be, obsessively and continuously renewing a cycle in which the beginning and end points are unrecognizable.

With regards to Emiliano Aversa’s work, the show’s title highlights something essential but at the same time paradoxical. His work, decidedly revolutionary, a careful study seeking to eliminate the space-time binomial and focused on the evolution of the concept of duration that is realized inside a circumscribed space (hence the expression video tableau), rejects any type of traversal because everything that is to be declared is already found on the surface. In it stillness and acceleration inextricably make up fundamental elements of the work’s becoming and the movement constructs instant by instant the basis for a two-dimensional a priori. Jesse Benson’s work, extremely detailed and handled with great care and formidable pictorial skill, aesthetically traverses photorealism, hyperrealism, and surrealism and develops on a single surface on which different situations, movements, and spaces coexist. The internal flow to the work is interrupted by a temporary construction that divides the visual experience and defines movement with interruptions planned between rooms and an emphasis on transitional spaces. Adam Henry, through his use of color from a structural and formal point of view and with his prevalently geometrical orientation inspired by modernist concrete painting, achieves results of great fascination at the edge of the oneiric. Color occupies planes or levels rigidly separated on the canvas so that his paintings play with the idea of clarity. Forms and atmosphere creates visual enigmas that seem at the same time both in focus and out of focus.

Through his work Henry aims to establish that logic is contextual and often does not involve an over and under because it is fundamentally central, free, and often far from the status quo, thus transcending all the rigor of academic logic. Beatriz Olabarrieta’s work, viewed as an organic space of transmission and reception, is focused on the experience of communication and is connoted by a literal and metaphorical mobility. The sculpture is logographic and diagrammatic and opens up towards the outside and to other things. There is a lexicon of simple and suggestive forms such as the profile of a face composed of almost onomatopoetic forms. The materials, often carved to create silhouettes, open spaces and holes evoke almost slippery surfaces that do not allow one to slow down and position a message despite the possibility to traverse the work itself. Naoki Sutter-Shudo explores the potential of expression, which, thanks to its power goes beyond that of communication, by means of an extraordinary attention to detail. His artistic approach ranges between infantile mannerism and a more mature approach. His works continuously oscillate between the present and past, between organic and artificial, functionality and pure formality traversing the present time without ever forgetting the past, in equilibrium between stories of the Old World and the ups and downs of the capitalist system. Priscilla Tea describes spaces in their moment of transition, between a solid and gaseous state, loosening and constricting, protection and disorientation. By means of dual painting incorporating both digital techniques and analogical rules that develop along large dimensions, proposed new perspectives, metaphysical spaces and meditative extensions, balanced between the real and the virtual.

— Domenico de Chirico, 2018