Atipografia presents, at the gallery spaces in Arzignano (Vicenza), the exhibition THE SHAPE OF WORDS, a solo show by Paduan artist Stefano Mario Zatti, curated by Robert Phillips and Matilde Nuzzo. The exhibition, which opens Atipografia’s 2023 program, runs from Saturday, Jan. 21 to Sunday, Feb. 26, 2023.
The exhibition explores the artistic journey of Stefano Mario Zatti by proposing new and different keys to interpreting his work. The Shape of Words offers twelve large works on the ground floor of the gallery and continues upstairs with works belonging to the phase of Zatti’s artistic journey linked to the transition between the conceptual and his particular representation of the verb as a means of expression.
The word as an act of creation stands at the basis of the research from which the exhibition originates. It ranges from the purely symbolic representation of “blood of my blood,” or of the “shrouds,” where the word is not an element shown, but subtended, as if feelings were transformed into spellings and spellings into feelings, to works such as “99 names” or “mundus” where the very graphic element shows the word as the final, and foundational, act of representation.
His words are shadows that occupy small cutouts within an absolute space placed in deliberately silent and, at times, uneasy and dark contexts. Not portraits or physiognomies isolated in the grayness of a canvas, but words or artistic gestures to be looked at with an awareness of the actions evoked, small tiles that become emblems of a relational object, in a process that is no longer just personal drama, but is generalized, filtered through physical and emotional distance where the landscape of representation is circumscribed and, seemingly, suffocated within the perimeter of the works.
The basic concept underlying this exhibition arose from the comparison of the various sensibilities of the people accompanying the artist on his journey. By discussing and analyzing Zatti’s work in its various declinations, in which the written word is often the motif initials of his representation, it was realized that at the bottom of each work there existed a narrative, a kind of latent bubble, which expresses through writing every aspect of his works. This form of personal encyclopedia, an abacus of the unconscious, contained in his densely written booklets bordering on the indecipherable, represents an instrument of representation of the verisimilitude, a kind of conscious illusion tied as it is, inextricably, to the everyday suggestions of the concepts underlying the elaboration of the aesthetic pleasure of the artist’s work.
The works in the exhibition, as a whole, represent one of the heads of the metaphysics of absence where, the loss of points of reference in reality, creates an extreme detachment, aided by the almost total rejection of color, but where the extreme synthesis of Zatti’s making, freed as it is from any superstructure, finds its maximum representational clarity.
As an artist of great representational power, Zatti delves into every component of his own interiority, giving it back a visible form and going beyond the banality of the mere factual representation of everyday perception to push beyond the barriers of the conceptual and making himself a conscious interpreter, with absolute integrity and sincerity, of those hidden patterns that underlie all artistic representation.
The exhibited works are accompanied by a writing that recounts, in poetic but also critical form, the complex interactions that lead to the genesis of the artist’s works, showing fragments of memories that resurface, forgotten places, distant memories that are returned to the reader as metaphors of a path that is difficult to recount by other means. The paper is conceived and written in the form of a multi-voice conversation between the artist, Elena Dal Molin and the curators of the exhibition.
