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.
Poca notte brings together a body of paintings featuring the recent developments in the artist’s work. These evolve from an approach to making which takes place in the presence of things, portrayed from life, sometimes in a 1:1 scale. This presentness involves direct observation and action, without later reconsideration: a process which invokes that of the itinerant painters and connoisseurs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who explored and documented the countryside that bordered towns and cities.
The subjects of the works on view include both some of Tocca’s recurring motifs and new ones: objects - the crumpled newspaper from the previous day, domestic tools such as brooms lying in a corner, overlooked, on the margins of everything, before their daily use; worn shoes and jackets that are still wet from rain; landscapes seen through a window - that is, through the condensation that forms on the pane at night, the carrier of a continuous interaction between the inside and outside; views that are partially covered and framed by the lower part of an umbrella or by sunglasses.
With their distinctively vertical and horizontal shapes, Tocca’s small, medium-sized canvases are almost entirely occupied by the represented objects as to imply a reciprocal enactment between the physicality of the seen and the thingness of the painting, between documentation and imagination. Isolated on the gallery walls, each resonates through the space, inviting temporary dialogues from different viewpoints.
What unites these recent works is their origin in a particular condition of vision, one that coincides with the intermediate time between night and day when the earliest glimmers of light allow for the day’s first views to emerge from darkness. “It is the ideal dimension of an almost-nothing – says the artist – where ‘everything’ is still to be gained, almost stolen – even a distant light, rays, a flash that recalls lightning but isn’t. Then comes the dawn, that silly sensation of crescendo, that feeling of the incremental”. The night is short, but Poca notte subtly traces the storyline of an individual (although, as always in Tocca's paintings, no people are depicted) who awakes early to contemplate things; wandering around rooms, down corridors and along the landing beyond the door; in the hours when life - past and future - slowly enters consciousness in silence and stillness.
