Luca Pancrazzi at Galleria degli Uffizi
Sixteen contemporary artists, eight Italian and eight Belgian, confront the 16:9 panoramic format, exhibiting pairs of works in dialogue with masterpieces in the Uffizi Gallery, including paintings by Fra Bartolomeo, Giovanni Bellini, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, Tintoretto, Veronese.
It is Land In Land Out, an exhibition welcomed in the Vasarian museum from Feb. 13 to March 17, 2024 and curated by Brussels-based MODO asbl cultural association together with Francesca Sborgi for the Galleria degli Uffizi.
The choice of the sixteen-ninths format as the 'common thread' of the exhibition represents art's attempt to rediscover the most intimate and profound sense of looking represented in the contemporary age by the cell phone format but, above all, a measure of human psycho-vision, with the intention of highlighting the relationship between the work of art and the viewer and what perceptual meter we use to define what divides us and the imagined dimension of the work.
At the same time, the exhibition also aims to establish a connection between Italian and Belgian culture, focusing on the concepts of landscape observation and interpretation. The landscape genre, starting from its maximum diffusion around the 16th century in the Netherlands, distinguishes the history of art in these two countries; Italy and Belgium have often confronted each other with it, exerting over time and in artistic experiences a mutual contamination. Even today the word landscape refers to a traditional idea of naturalistic representation and, in more general terms, to the painting bounded by the border of a frame.
Through their works, the artists featured in Land In Land Out address the forcings and stereotypes of this genre: they are Lucia Bru, Hans Demeulenaere, Edith Dekyndt, Stef Driesen, Hans Op de Beeck, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Serena Fineschi, Tina Gillen, Marco Neri, Luca Pancrazzi, Alessandro Scarabello, Serse, Pieter Vermeersch, Laura Viale, Luca Vitone, and Sophie Whettnall.
Luca Pancrazzi, present in ROOM A29 with Sophie Whettnall, in dialogue with Lorenzo di Credi.
The meeting point between Pancrazzi and Whettnall lies in the liminal dimension of the masterwork, which, at its core, constitutes an alchemical space made up of "inside and outside," "light and shadow." Both men's focus on revisiting natural environments and the architectural landscape, combined with their propensity for monochrome, converges in the compositional complexity of Lorenzo di Credi's work.