Nicturia

10 & zero uno is pleased to present, within its own spaces in Via Garibaldi 1830, Nicturia, a solo exhibition by Beatrice Gelmetti, curated by Chiara Boscolo and with a critical text by Francesco Liggieri, from September 8th to October 28th, 2023, opening Thursday September 7th, at 6:30 PM.

As Liggieri explains in his critical essay, looking at Gelmetti’s works we find before us today an artist who, through the language of abstractionism, by means of brushstrokes and forms that are completely studied and intentional, speaks with an apparently casual code, but which instead has a precise intention: to break the barrier of abstractionism as a place of contrivance. Since its inception, painting has been a means of expression and communication with codes and signs that take us from the Stone Age to the present day to codify an image and grasp its meaning, or so we believe and write in visual design manuals. In reality, our perception of a painting is always subjective and what I feel often has nothing to do with what you feel. Painting is a matter of feeling, feeling with all the senses, abstractionism is the best way to listen to them.

Beatrice Gelmetti is a painter of colours and shapes, of stories and abstract multiverses of simple but never banal languages. She has embarked on the path of abstract painting, which has different types of language, choosing the path of comparison, comparing herself with the history of abstract artists such as Rauschenberg and Rothko to name but two heavyweights on the subject, and trying to make her mark in her time. He often paints works that make one feel and make one feel sensations far removed in time and space; George Gurdjieff claimed that in order to evolve, human beings had to pursue paths and for each of them, there was work to be done. Painting often reminds us that no step is easy and one has to work on one’s own quest towards the path one wants to take. Today, we have the opportunity to see with our own eyes where this path has led Gelmetti, a solo exhibition with works in different formats and styles that never abandon the path of abstractionism as the high road dear to many artists of his generation and beyond. There are works in Nicturia that were created to complete that Surrealist bridge between wakefulness and sleep, so dear to Salvador Dalì who claimed to find in that interval the images that would later become his works, a factor that returns in this exhibition at 10 & zero uno in Venice.

It is amusing to think that the title of this solo exhibition refers to that stimulus that causes us to wake up when we need to go to the bathroom at night. A stimulus that comes from our brain that never actually sleeps, a function that is part of the same family of visual stimuli that in Gelmetti’s Nicturia there are and many. The path was arduous and natural but the language obtained is of the most sensitive and in some ways metaphysical, a constant dialogue between levels of experience that climb like a ladder until reaching a limpid aura, something difficult to manage. Something not easy to achieve if we want to label it, but which in these works is a natural path. Gelmetti has gone as far as she could go for now, aware that this journey is just one more layer of a longer and more fascinating journey to places where only abstract painting, the high painting, can take those who have chosen it as a dialogue to the outside world.