“doppio soggetto”, bi-personal exhibition of Antonio Catelani (Florence, 1962) and Luca Pancrazzi (Florence, 1961) artists active on the national and international scene for some decades.

Antonio Catelani and Luca Pancrazzi date their first meeting and the beginning of a fruitful relationship of friendship and intellectual understanding since the time of the studies and the subsequent first collective exhibitions of generation that date back to the second half of the Eighties.
The exhibition is structured in two distinct cycles of unpublished artworks created for the occasion, that will be placed in parallel in the wide spaces of the gallery. This exhibition highlights the way in which both artists, through a linearity of research conducted over time with rigor and always renewed experimentation, have maintained a rare coherence that demonstrates how in current works are always in place the theoretical assumptions firmly pursued since first works of many years ago.

Catelani presents a series of sculptures in plaster and black ceramic which, through an intentional forcing of the boundaries between drawing and plastic volume, create a short circuit between what is perceived by the senses and the reality of the work as a product, imposing the observer further cognitive focus.
Now as then, in the sculptures of the Eighties, drawing and plan become for Catelani generative elements of volume and form.
The small sculptures exhibited here are created by a process of transposition and "materialization" of a silhouette drawing, previously obtained by tracing the profile of a real hand on a cartboard; the first one was the left hand of the artist himself, and then of many others, among friends, colleagues and acquaintances. The cardboard, cut out and folded according to the drawn outline, is then filled with an excessive volume of material that not exactely takes into account the natural hand/model but, almost in opposition, it self-represents and self-exalts as autonomous Volume, rising to rank of "subject" itself. The classic process of calque or casting molds gives volume and texture to the finished shape, that now appears smooth and white, now corrugated and black.
The final "three-dimensioned" form assumed by the work appears therefore incongruent, paradoxical. Subtracted from any descriptive naturalism or copy of the truth, this sculpture deforms the common image of a hand as we all have it in mind and becomes the origin of multiple images and references of all kinds. Thus it appears in the shape of stone, rock, glove, paw, clod, animal, draft of bread; likewise, multiple aesthetic references are generated, primitive, futuristic, archaic or, on the contrary, futurible, robotics and mechanics of a disassembled Golem; until the formal echoes of solemn Italic sculpture, of twentieth century "antigrazioso" and massive sculpture of the Twenties, or comics design, all indistinct and co-present.

Pancrazzi creates his artworks with a cyclic global meaning interpretable through the series of works that intertwine and unfold over time in an autonomous way and that individually are protagonists of a wider interpretative plot. The artist never forgets the image, there is always an image of departure or arrival, even in the most abstract and formal processes the image is always evoked and it remains anyway the protagonist, also in the works presented in this exhibition.
In Paesaggi Ciclici Variati, a cycle of painted photo-copies on canvas, the archetypal-landscapes, which have sedimented since the early 80s within the activity and thought of the artist, return.
The novelty is represented by the insertion of reticular inserts, small cages that condense shreds of images, chromatic overlaps, always on those shades of whites and grays that punctuate the personal geography of the places so dear to Pancrazzi, real places that however lose their a properly geographical connotation to become symbols of different spatiality; meta-modern landscapes reduced to an essential image and filtered by human and mechanical metabolism, a crowd of rhythmic signs, which the artist does not seek to decode but to grasp in their complexity and in the infinite combinatorial possibilities, recognizing themselves in the low fidelity of reproduction. In this sense, the photocopier becomes the ideal tool to lower the glossy quality of self-celebratory photography, breaking it down into simplified screens.
The images come from the continuous and prolific process of documentation that the artist builds in many different ways in order to form a real archive; a daily practice with which the artist documents the landscapes traversed as deep sediments, through images not printed in the retina, but in the bottom of the collective memory. Frequently in the works of Pancrazzi the necessary condition is created to determine a sky and an earth, a horizon from which architectural infrastructures emerge. In Paesaggi Ciclici Variati the image from background becomes fundamental and the painting is the fusion with the world of chemistry and physics, moving the new final image towards a controlled creative accident.
The difficult control of the processes put in place contrasts the pro-creative seriality of these new images that overlap in all the deep archetypal stratifications, building their renewed mythological sense.