On 3 October 2019 at 6 pm, Studio Cenacchi in the heart of Bologna opens I luoghi della polvere, an exhibition featuring 25 recent works by the young Uruguayan artist Augusto Gadea. Curated by Jacopo Cenacchi, with a critical essay by Raffaele Milani, the exhibition runs until 26 October 2019.

I luoghi della polvere reflects Gadea’s continuing exploration of landscape through painting and his interest in the possibilities of using earth itself to depict it. One of the most distinctive emerging painters of his generation, Gadea works directly with matter, combining charcoal and pastel with clay, earth and sand.

The landscapes in the exhibition belong to two different worlds: rural Uruguay and the countryside of Emilia. Gadea brings them together until the boundaries between them begin to dissolve. What connects them is his vision of nature, at once lyrical and intensely alive.

Raffaele Milani writes:

“Earth can essentially be seen through two opposing paradigms: order and disorder, harmony and disharmony. Paradise and apocalypse are both here, around us — in magnificent landscapes as well as in the devastation caused by war and human irresponsibility.

We contemplate the immense sculpture and architecture of the world, but also its destruction. And yet its representation can still give us pleasure, because its cathartic power offers some release from the misery of suffering. Between these two extremes lies an entire spectrum of different forms of beauty.

The four natural elements — water, earth, air and fire — can inspire either terror or sublimity. Their forces seem forever held in a precarious, unstable balance. It is within this underlying sense of unease that Augusto Gadea’s celebration of the earth takes shape. […]

Landscape becomes nature itself, entering the mystery of life and existence through feeling and contemplation. The materials Gadea uses make its emotional origins palpable. His landscapes of earth resemble a troubled theology, or perhaps a celestial morphology.

In myth, the earth inhabited by Gadea’s disrupted clays becomes a temple of humankind through a symbolic and architectural transformation. It is sacred in its fertility, in the splendour of what it produces, a living divinity. It is what the Greeks called Gaia. It takes us back to the beginning, to clay itself: in so many creation stories, the substance from which humankind is formed.”

From the critical essay by Raffaele Milani

Augusto Gadea
I luoghi della polvere
Curated by Jacopo Cenacchi
Critical text by Raffaele Milani

3 October> 26 October 2019

GALLERIA STUDIO CENACCHI
Via Santo Stefano 63
40125 Bologna

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