MATERIA INQUIETA  (Milan, 2025).

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“questioning what seems to have ceased to amaze us forever” Georges Perec

 

"Where to start to build a new meaning, when the ever-faster flow of time seems to atomize any connection?

 

The infraordinary, in Georges Perec's thought, directs his attention towards a sensitivity capable of finding a disturbing complexity in the ordinary. Writing, for him, is an attempt to retain and make survive what lives between the folds of everyday life: what is visible, but escapes attention; what is part of our routine, but remains in the shadows. Similarly, the artists in the exhibition explore, each with their own practice, the intrinsic architecture of the infraordinary with which they compare themselves. This process of visibility and reflection on what we take for granted thus becomes a moving magma, a moment of catharsis.

 

Scandiuzzi compares the fragility of space and everyday existence. As Perec writes in Species of Spaces: "space is a doubt: I must continually identify it, designate it. It is never mine, it is never given to me, I must conquer it. My spaces are fragile: time will consume them, destroy them [...] Time takes it away with it and leaves me only shapeless shreds." In his paintings, space is unstable, constantly re-actualized by the pictorial act. His work feeds on this existential doubt, collecting and layering traces of everyday life. Far from monumentality, his research wraps itself around objects, memories and forgotten places, transforming them into hotbeds of reflection and collectivization.

 

Through the materiality and plasticity of things, Vullo makes Perec's idea his own according to which "what we must question are the bricks, the cement, the glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. Questioning what seems to have ceased to amaze us forever." His sculptures reveal what has become invisible, intertwining different temporalities: the longue durée of some materials is contrasted with the ephemeral precariousness of the split second that characterizes the cycle of others. Playing with tensions between artificial and natural, solid and fragile, Vullo opens cracks in common sense, suggesting new readings of reality.

 

In a reality that does not seem to slow down, where objects, landscapes and materials are less and less listened to in their immanence, it becomes urgent to find alternative ways of reconnecting with what surrounds us. In unison, the works on display want to suggest that, perhaps, it is precisely from this possibility of observing everyday life with a renewed gaze that an everlasting order can emerge. And it is in this context that the reflections of Scandiuzzi and Vullo can make us reflect on the potential that, instead, a partial vision can offer: is it from this embodied subjectivity that an antifragile configuration can emerge?"

Riccardo Rizzetto

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Artists: Pierluigi Scandiuzzi and Francesco Vullo

EGO projects by Filippo Zagarese, hosted at S2A Architects, via Zebedia 7, Milano

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