5 maggio 2017 – 24 giugno 2017
curated by Agata Polizzi
Concetta Modica’s research is threaded in the dialogue between the present and the past which does not exist as a custodian of time, but only as a sum of events, a synthesis of experiences whose deepest meaning lies in fragility. Time exists only at the precise moment in which anything takes place. It is as if there were nothing anymore when looking back, just some sparse traces that bind things together. Yet, for Concetta Modica, retrieving the intimate bond between what was before and what comes after allows her to experience herself and others. Interest in history becomes a method in her art, an opportunity to seek and understand, and therefore intervene on reality.
The works on display at Galleria Francesco Pantaleone Arte Contemporanea strongly testify to the artist’s troubled effort to “measure” existence and to seek, with a certain travail, to shape existing matter, with interventions ex post facto.
And this marks the most dramatic and intense moment in Concetta Modica’s work, since, though the manipulation of things is feasible, there is an insurmountable limit, namely the awareness of the imponderable that makes everything indefinite, leaving work unfinished and in some way also left to its fate. In this vagueness that escapes control, there is a real opportunity for work to come alive again, finding a new place in nature.
Fragile / Epic – shows the effort to bring the series of events that constitute our experience back to the present. Likewise, any manufactured product is, for Concetta Modica, the result of a sum in which “what remains” overlaps with what is new and continues its existence in time.
Both the embroidery that binds together the threads and patterns and the ceramic animated by color, as well as the sculpture that overlaps between their parts and different materials are the instruments representing the alternation between the eternal attempt to deal with time and the vain epic struggle to escape it.
It is uneven fight. Yet, always and in every time, it is revived with extreme and daring pretense, almost a rebellion and never a surrender, as a dramatic assertion of the self.
All that is left is just one certainty: in the present time, where everything happens, everything is possible; the moment in which one’s belonging to the universe is perceived, experimented with the senses, through breath, with the exact perception that we are in the world, here and now, and that we are really part of a continuum in which everyone has a precise place.
If we were to chart out the time-line of Concetta Modica’s work, we could call into question the Aorist, that is to say the pure and gnomic tense that expresses knowledge and awareness. It is in the “γνῶθι σεαυτόν” (gnòthi seautòn – know thyself) that this search finds meaning, in the cyclical nature of thought that draws from the past in an eternal present and is able to renew itself precisely because it is indefinite and narrative in nature. This perhaps determinist association restores the opportunity to access experience to recontextualize a truly original sign of one’s own thought in the present.