Andirivieni

AndreaDLorenzo

 

Andirivieni

By Davide Ferri

It is entitled Andirivieni this exhibition by Andrea di Lorenzo; and since I was invited to write these lines, I have not stopped thinking about this word since Andrea communicated it to me. Andirivieni seems to me to subtend, in fact, many aspects of her practice. Which is made up of continuous movements, adjustments, rethinking, back and forth, tending to nurture an inexhaustible/unstoppable composability: the final form of Di Lorenzo’s sculpture always has the air of being a transitory, temporary state, something seen in glimpse and in constant evolution.

The comings and goings to which the title refers, moreover, seems to me to be comprised between two defined spaces: that of the exhibition, of course, and the adjoining foundry (of which Fuocherello is certainly an emanation), a place of the craft and knowledge of the hands, inevitably marked by precise rhythms and times, and by a defined and stable processuality.

A kind of clandestinity, on the other hand, is the one that envelops the exhibition space as a dark, secret counterbalance to the “bright” one next to it, the foundry. A clandestinity marked, first of all, by Di Lorenzo’s intervention on the windows (common industrial shed windows, whose view is that of the Maritime, Cottian, Graian, and Pennine Alps and the surrounding countryside, a cultivated countryside dotted with suburban, terraced, and prefabricated houses), dirtied with jets of raw clay to simulate a dirty rain, a muddy rain that has lapped, settling on them, all the windows.

When I think about it, the sheet of glass marked and stained by raw clay-with disguised naturalness, as a simple gesture of the hand that gives birth to a two-dimensional sculpture that is configured as a membrane and sensitive surface skin-is one of the emblematic forms of Di Lorenzo’s practice. In a group exhibition a few years ago (Tragitti divaganti, distractions from a goal, P420, Bologna), for example, glass plates with traces of clay (the result of circular and curvilinear hand movements) drew and reinvented the space a few steps away from the entrance: they were encumbrances, obstacles to body movements, but diaphragms for the gaze, because looking through them reconfigured, in the sign of a diffuse opacity, some of the works that stood on the other side.

This is basically what happens in Andirivieni as well: while on the one hand, the glass panes with jets and blobs of clay enclose the space, isolating it, hiding it, and enclosing it in a private dimension (very close to that of the artist’s studio); on the other hand, by contrast, looking through it from the inside, they transform a landscape into an image, bringing it into a muffled form inside the exhibition space.

But what circumscribes and conceals Di Lorenzo’s window intervention? A space that has all the air of being a kind of “secret garden,” a “studio – greenhouse” where to cultivate the minimal and the residual. A territory in which things, catalogued as remnants and tools of manual labor (pipes and clamps that seem to come from the other side, from the foundry) and minimal natural elements that seem to be samplings from a landscape very similar to the one seen outside the windows, a natural bloodless but capable of expressing the last residue of vitality (evoked by steel and concrete casts of twigs and dried flowers that have interrupted their growth process), become basic units of a grammar that unfolds under the banner of modularity. Thus things can combine to indicate hypotheses of new forms and processes of development, climb up and balance themselves in marginal areas of the room (to take from the best position the light that the windows filter inside), or come closer in pairs and small series to draw the space – as punctuation or hatching – distributing themselves on the floor (it is usually the floor where Di Lorenzo’s sculpture is translated and configured into image).

Andirivieni is, finally, the movement of his sculptures in space, their ability to articulate themselves in a variable-geometry layout around a hypothetical center, which I like to think coincides with that wall (the main one inside Fuocherello) that Andrea has decided to deliberately leave blank, like a page yet to be written but “gripped,” “grasped” in the edge of the wall, as the left hand blocks a support while the right hand prepares to write. But gripped by what? By a small intervention (also repeated on the edge of one of the small walls in the room) that is the result of the combination of a clamp (another recurring element in Di Lorenzo’s work as the first sign of a grasping, of a taking possession of space), and the steel cast of an ungrown, dry, banana helmet, an abortion of a fruit: thus, supported by the clamp, it too becomes, by contagion, an enigmatic instrument of a doing to come.