Daniele Cabri feels a deep affinity with Antonio Ligabue, an artist he first encountered as a young boy through the television drama starring Flavio Bucci. The primal creative force behind Cabri’s work, however, comes from somewhere closer to home: his visceral attachment to Rocchetta, the small village near Guiglia, in the province of Modena, where his family has its roots. It is his Heimat — the place to which he belongs.

Rocchetta and the memory of childhood run through everything Cabri thinks and makes. Alongside the ‘shamanic’ element explored in the critical essay, they remain a constant presence in his work. Childhood — or rather, Childhood — is imagined as an uncorrupted state, something to be sought through an artistic practice of remarkable persistence, originality and depth.

Memory is where Cabri’s art begins, and this exhibition brings together a substantial part of that journey. Working on animal hides, he portrays the people, animals and objects associated with his parents’ native village. The process is both painful and necessary: an attempt to rescue them from oblivion by giving them form once more.

As José Saramago wrote in The Lanzarote Notebooks:

“Memory is a statue of clay. The wind passes and, little by little, carries away particles, grains, crystals. […] Minute by minute, what once was is no longer, and nothing would remain of the statue but a shapeless outline if, minute after minute, we did not continue to restore memory, from memory.”

The exhibition features more than 70 works created on animal hides using a pyrograph and blowtorch. In her critical essay, Maria Chiara Wang describes the exhibition as:

“an initiatory journey that leads the audience towards its ultimate destination, through obstacles and moments of contemplation.

AD LUNAM is an impulse, a striving, an intention. It is both the direction to follow and the destination itself.

It is also the story of a journey. It begins with scenes of teeming village life — the figures from the series When We Were Lovable Savages… — before entering the Latebra, a place in which contact with the Earth and with the self can be rediscovered. From there, the journey rises towards the heavens, culminating in the installation The Carousel of the Moons.

AD LUNAM unfolds within an esoteric atmosphere. Like a shaman, Daniele Cabri invests his art with healing and therapeutic powers. This approach reflects the profound influence that Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ideas, together with his practice of psychomagic acts, have had on the artist’s life.”

Il Resto del Carlino – Bologna 15 ottobre 2021
Corriere della Sera – Bologna 15 ottobre 2021

Daniele Cabri
Ad lunam
Curated by Elisabetta Roncati and Maria Chiara Wang

15 October > 20 November 2021

GALLERIA STUDIO CENACCHI
Via Santo Stefano 63
40125 Bologna

OPENING HOURS
Tuesday–Saturday: 4.30–7.30 pm
Monday: by appointment
Sunday: closed