Indagine di una piega

10 & zero uno is pleased to present Indagine di una piega, a solo exhibition by Eva Chiara Trevisan (Treviso, 1991) who is exhibiting for the first time in its spaces in Via Garibaldi 1830, a few steps away from the gardens of the Venice Biennale. The exhibition opens to the public on January 25th at 6.30 PM and is narrated by the words of Alessandra Maccari.

The ineffable borderline between painting and sculpture, the theme of drapery declined in a contemporary key and the vitality of matter are some of the knots around which the variegated corpus of works that make up Indagine di una piega unfolds. Eva Chiara Trevisan explores the quality of the surface and the possibilities of the fold, modelling a pictorial substance that preserves the sign of completed gestures and activates a haptic perception. The artist lives and works in Venice – the home of tonal painting, where the superimposition of colours and attention to luministic effects produce a plastic illusion – so her orientation towards colour as a means of expression is part of a tradition that characterises the lagoon city in its predilection for an element that is emotionally experienced by the viewer and charged with cultural meanings.

Trevisan’s approach to the chromatic datum is instinctive, he maintains a dialogue with it until he reaches a moment of suspension, and he does this by working on the ground, through a physical relationship with the acrylic substance; in the series Lo que toco (2024) he simulates drapery, an element that dresses the body but is affected by the atmosphere, whose curves generate light and shadow, exhibiting its depth. Colour manifests itself here in its corporeal dimension, the painting emancipates itself from the support and acquires the three-dimensionality, weight and idea of movement typical of reality, giving rise to embodied images where even the reverse can manifest itself. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, recognising in the Baroque style a textile form that tends to free itself from subordination to a finite body, asserted that ‘perhaps painting needs to break out of the picture and become a sculpture’. In this sense, the artist intends to probe the plastic properties of pictorial matter by creating a hybrid form that mocks the canvas and not only can do without this support but also manages to imitate its textile qualities.

The works Orogenesi and Strato D (from the series Tessuto temporale, 2025-ongoing) appear to be aerial shots of the globe or cutouts of the earth’s surface that refer to the formation of reliefs and a region of the earth’s mantle, respectively. The term surface (from the Latin super-facies, upper face) designates a thickness that delimits a body affected by both inner and outer motions; this element is isolated by the artist by showing how it is composed of various layers that, as in the case of the ground, also fix a precise temporality and can resurface during landslides. Similarly, the irregularities on the skin of the works, the result of the artist’s gesture and the action of the environment, refer to those of the earth. This painting, which begins as a uniform field, ends up behaving like a baroque form, and thanks to its layering allows the creation of undulating movements with effects of dynamic tension. Deleuze in The Fold argued that ‘the informal does not constitute a simple negation of form: it testifies to form as a folded form that exists only as a “landscape of the mental”’: the fold for the author thus becomes the distinctive feature of the Baroque, in a continuous variation that relates matter and soul. Trevisan uses this principle to create the idea of movement that permeates his works; it is a metamorphosis that, as Georges Didi-Huberman states in Ninfa Moderna, has to do with drapery. The latter, elected by Aby Warburg as a ‘pathetic utensil’, has the power to animate the inanimate, and is ultimately an interface of the body – from the bandages to the shroud – that accompanies the passage between the existing and the non-existent, between form and formlessness. The title of the work Lo que toco – Naiadi (2024) refers to the figure of the nymph, a divinity of which Didi-Huberman illustrates the process of separation between body and garment, and consequently the emotions reverberate on the cloth whose fate is formlessness. The artist seems to want to reflect precisely on the fate of the fallen drapery, which obtains a visual autonomy, so her painting acquires a weight and tends to sink downwards. The works in the series Di-spiegare la materia (2024-ongoing), while retaining their object nature, are again placed on the wall and appear as earthy views that take on the appearance of a relic, of a fold locked in its development that conceals a large part of the work while maintaining its tension. The space included in the fold is part of the creation despite its existence being virtual, as is the void embedded in the painting.

One cannot speak of movement without considering the temporal dimension that, in the artist’s practice, is expressed in a continuum where the reminiscences of previous works find their place in the following ones, creating a thread that binds the artist’s entire research. Each layer influences the layering of the other and each new layer modifies the underlying surfaces to constitute temporal thickenings where the past influences the future and the present intervenes on the lived. Trevisan thus seems to activate what Jean Dubuffet called the ‘kinematics of painting’, to indicate the act of the viewer reliving the elaboration of the work, and to show us how matter has its own memory.