Exhibition Details

Matter becomes light in the exhibition Mehr Licht, which from 19 March to 23 July 2022 will bring the works of Domenico Bianchi to the Galleria Poggiali in Florence for the first time. Domenico Bianchi is one of the Italian artists that enjoy the greatest international recognition, boasting a presence at several editions of the Venice Biennale as well as solo and group shows in some of the most important museums in Italy and abroad including the MoMA in New York, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the MOCA and the Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Magazzino Italia Art in New York, as well as the Madre in Naples, the Castello di Rivoli and the GAM in Turin, the MAMbo in Bologna, the Mart in Rovereto and the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato.
For his first solo show at the Galleria Poggiali the artist has conceived a corpus of works drawing on his poetic universe that showcase original solutions. These include unusual combinations of wax colours such as white and pink or blue and yellow, wall-hung creations in white Carrara marble with lapis lazuli set into it, engravings on wood and crafting of palladium. In the Via Benedetta premises the series of works on display – some of the large format – is the outcome of an exhibition in which the creative tension is intense, exclusive and concentrated. The title of the exhibition – Mehr Licht – takes inspiration from the famous cry ‘More light!’ said to have been uttered by Goethe on his deathbed on 22 March 1832. This phrase sums up the profound relationship that Goethe had with the concept of light – which he dwelt on at length in several of his works dealing with natural science, such as the Theory of Colours and The Metamorphosis of Plants, and is also perfectly appropriate for the works of Domenico Bianchi.
In the Mehr Licht exhibition – which is accompanied by a catalogue with a critical article by Sergio Risaliti – the works displayed by Domenico Bianchi are forms created by carving out the wood and pouring in the wax, or by bas-relief sculping on marble. This is a body of pictorial works in which matter is transformed into light without losing its physicality, that tangible presence that distinguishes them from traditional paintings. It is the matter – palladium, wax, wood or marble – that emanates a splendour that transcends a symbolic dimension by means of a series of abstract geometrical figures that often occupy the centre of the composition. In the works on slabs of marble, the artist appears to dialogue with Donatello’s famous stiacciato, the technique used by the Renaissance master to produce flat images with infinitesimal modulations of thickness which, as in drawing, entrusted the task of defining the perspective depth to the mathematical construction of space and sophisticated plays of light and shadow.
Using a similar technical process, Bianchi achieves depth and narrative variety through an abstract language, responding to the fifteenth-century concept of perspective with a fluid notion of space devoid of representative images. Amidst the linear and geometrical forms of Bianchi’s works it is the diaphanous light and the connection between matter and energy that generates the space with its depths, extensions and multiple dimensions that also include time, and hence the duration of our cognitive and contemplative processes.