Testa carbonara, a solo exhibition by Francesco Bocchini, opens at Studio Cenacchi on 5 May at 5 pm. The exhibition is curated by Beatrice Buscaroli.

The exhibition, the second organised by the gallery with the Romagna-born artist, brings together the most recent examples of Bocchini’s now familiar mechanisms: wall-mounted or freestanding works that invite visitors to interact with them and become part of the creative process. By turning a small handle, part of the work is set in motion, fulfilling Bocchini’s invitation to bring the inanimate to life.

Also on display are refined and mysterious installations made from recycled sheet metal, evoking imaginary vegetation, brambles, tiny seeds and flowers. The exhibition concludes with several large-scale mixed-media works on paper, among the latest developments in Bocchini’s artistic research. Combining painting, collage and writing, these works perhaps bring us closer than his sheet-metal pieces to the artist’s imaginative world and the references that shape it.

As curator Beatrice Buscaroli writes in her critical text:

“[…] Francesco Bocchini’s works belong to that kind of visual practice in which ‘one chooses to assemble a collection of disparate things, establishing intimate and secret relationships between them’. In other words, this is not a ‘picture’ in which multiplicity is brought together into a system, but rather a ‘table’ that sets a mechanism in motion, dismantling and deconstructing the traditional order that binds objects together and suggesting — or prompting — a new constructive logic.”

And again:

“[…] the works embrace visual dislocations, combining tiny inscriptions in mysterious scripts with small images — a drawing found on the ground, a fragment of a photograph — or unfolding across large works on paper where colour, bold, relentless and direct, takes over. In the display cases, this interplay reaches another dimension, where it becomes difficult to distinguish presence from reality. The artist’s thinking is governed by a kind of expansive irony, and it is impossible to tell whether its target is the viewer or the artist himself as he fills these spaces — himself transformed from provocateur into the provoked — through unexpected yet intelligible connections, all seeking to recover some linearity of meaning while breaking apart conventional logical relationships.”