Francesco Bocchini’s solo exhibition Carnival opens at Galleria Studio Cenacchi in Bologna on 20 January 2018.

A sound, a suggestion. Reality turned upside down.

At the heart of the exhibition is Grünewald’s Crucifixion, the point around which everything revolves in a precarious, dreamlike balance. Delicate buds and luxuriant flowers are caught up in a savage and misshapen natural world of thorns and twisted forms. The same thorns tear into a bruised body already beginning to decay, while countless monsters emerge from precariously balanced branches. Nothing is what it seems.

This is carnival as a reversal of order: a mask concealing the truth, a temporary release into madness. Goya and his Caprichos come to mind, as does the delirious imagery of Bosch.

Reality remains suspended throughout. In Amor Celeste Turchino, the intensity of blue meets the sickly brightness of Flower Noise, with its jarring, deafening, jaundiced yellow. Space becomes dense and overloaded, crowded with sharp thorns and jagged sheets of metal. Their harsh physical presence finds an echo in the ragged holes, cuts and voids of Fontana’s La Fine di Dio.

The imagery of Carnival continues through a series of works on paper: collages combining photographs, cut-outs and oil paint. They reveal and conceal in equal measure. Faces disappear, eyes are hidden. As in a masked procession, identities blur and become something else.

The carnival parade carries on through ramshackle mechanisms that turn endlessly without purpose, locked into their own inevitable motion.

Bocchini’s choice of materials allows for extraordinary technical invention, yet the materials themselves are industrial waste, things made to be discarded. They are held together by the toxic fumes of molten lead, electrode welding and adhesives.

Nothing is what it seems.

Francesco Bocchini
Carnival
Curated by Jacopi Cenacchi
with text by Roberta Bertozzi
20 January > 24 March 2018

GALLERIA STUDIO CENACCHI
Via Santo Stefano 63
40125 Bologna

OPENING HOURS
Tuesday–Saturday: 4:30–7:30 pm
Monday: by appointment
Sunday: closed