Ipergrafie

Time is the constant shore where all my waves crash. Everything is moving and changing except him, this gigantic hourglass in which grains flow in one direction only.

—Francesca Matarazzo

Mucciaccia Contemporary is pleased to present IPERGRAFIE, Francesca Matarazzo’s first solo exhibition in Rome. The aim is to make known the artistic universe through 18 selected works of recent production.

The handwritings are printed in relief on slate, on aluminium sheets, and especially shaped on layers of “cementine” (a mix of stones, sand, glue and water) covered with acrylic paints on canvases of various sizes. The outcome is a real writing technique with illustrious predecessors, from the futurist random words to the surrealist poème-objet.

The exhibition, curated by Giulia Abate, will be inaugurated Friday 16th February 2018 from 6.30pm. The show will be accompanied by a catalogue edited by Carlo Cambi Editore with an unpublished interview of the curator to the artist and a critical text by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi.

Francesca Matarazzo was born in 1978 in Naples, where lives and works.

Her artistic research focuses on the evocative power of the word that materializes on his works. The quotes she chooses to use are those to which fragments of her experience belong. Overpowering leaps in the past or immediate future projections and sometimes are perfect companions of the material that touches and molds when she creates.

The mixed technique of stone, sand and lime is the result of a research based on the sensory and aesthetic pleasure which has always transmitted the use of heteroclite materials.«The grains of sand – says Francesca Matarazzo – always bring me back to time, which in my imagination takes this form.Time flows between my hands and gives me the illusion of being able to restrain it in a form, a word, a sentence that remains as it is, stable. Combining the grains of sand with stone derives from the same urgency to transmit a solid continuity».

For Matarazzo the work doesn’t want to be the product, but the means of a meditation or of a hypnotic experience attained through those letters that run between her fingers in the act of shaping them, like beads of a rosary or a Hindu or Buddhist mala. «The creation phase – writes Cesare Biasini Selvaggi in the catalogue – coincides with the ecstatic one, activated by words that act as an exclusive mental trigger, to allow thought to give way to that unconscious that the Neapolitan artist has tried to fathom for years, wearing a serious and painful diving suit. This exploitation of words by Matarazzo and their consequent “desacralisation”, authorizes the author to immerse them in layers of dense acrylic paints with baroque, classic and (why not?) even kitsch hues with that recurrent “shocking” gold».

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