Michele Tocca, La finestra (poca notte), detail, 2024. Oil on linen, nine pieces, cm 50 x 50 (each). Ph. Sebastiano Luciano
z2o Sara Zanin is pleased to present, on Thursday May 9th, Poca notte, the first solo exhibition in the gallery by Michele Tocca (Subiaco, 1983), curated by Davide Ferri.
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Poca notte includes a new body of paintings, showcasing the recent developments in the artist's poetics, based on an approach to painting that occurs in the presence of things, portrayed from life and sometimes in 1:1 scale, in a here and now of the image that does not involve later touch-ups but only direct observation and action, a processuality that evokes the figures of painters/travelers and connoisseurs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who, traveling for several months, explored the territory of countryside and cities.
The subjects of the paintings included in the exhibition are some of Tocca's recurring motifs: things and objects (the crumpled newspaper from the previous day, brooms and household tools lying in a corner of the house - forgotten, on the margins of everything, before use - worn shoes and jackets, still wet from rain, impregnated with atmospheric moisture, from outside, "landscape-jackets"); and landscapes, seen through a window, that is, through the vapours that settle on the glass - internal vapours that merge with external ones (clouds and atmospheric clots) to establish a continuity of vision between inside and outside - framed visions or partially covered by the lower part of an umbrella, or by the shutters of a window.
Tocca also paints small to medium-sized paintings and isolates them on the gallery walls to resonate different viewpoints of the exhibition space and temporary dialogues at a distance; paintings with distinctly horizontal or vertical cuts, whose surface is almost entirely occupied by the surface of the painted objects, as if there were a coincidence between the "thingness" of the painting and the thing represented.
What unites these new works, however, is that they arise from a particular condition of vision, one that coincides with an intermediate time between night and day, when the first glimmers and lights open the vision, first faintly, then resonating in the darkness. "It is the ideal dimension of almost nothing - says the artist - where 'everything' is still to be gained, stolen - even distant light, rays, a lightning flash that is not a flash. Then dawn comes, that stupid sensation of crescendo, with this beautiful untranslatable English word: incremental." Not only that: the night is short (as always in Tocca's painting, people do not appear) but Poca notte is a score that subtly traces a man who shortens sleep to look, wandering in rooms, in corridors and on the landing, at suspended things, where life, past and future, emerges in silence and inertia.
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