The hydrated silicate of alumina, together with iron and impurities, provides warmth and gorgeous stellar images...
The Gallery offers hospitality... it returns to the relationship and looks back at the past. Here are the dalmine pipes, the vices, rubber, concrete... I am not here... we have reached the pebbles, the friends of Amalfi... of Lia, Marcello and Ableo... Now we are going through the terracotta cone; perhaps I can’t see the space due to the Leather with resistance ... let’s look for another space.
We shall encounter the oar, the javelin, the handle, and perhaps we shall greet the parchment with the empty star... maybe we shall see it bring back the bearer of memory to the surface... yes, phosphorous.
Another star of five intertwined javelins... yes, I remember 1974, the first star of javelins that blocks the five trajectories and becomes an image that focuses energies.
The itinerary is adjusted to the unorganised “works” ... from the back of the room you eventually skirt the other two rooms where the plot-lines merge and then...
Gilberto Zorio, October 2023
The Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples is pleased to announce the opening, on Sunday 29 October, of the third solo exhibition of the artist Gilberto Zorio entitled: Le memorie scavalcano il presente e attivano il future (Memories override the present and activate the future)....
The installation is designed to be a voyage through the alchemic world of Gilberto Zorio, one of the leading figures of the Arte Povera movement, amid stars, towers, javelins, oars and canoes, cones, leather, sounds and words.
Zorio is a master of the creative process as a continuous transformation of chemical elements such as sulphur, phosphorous and alcohol. He combines these materials with others of various kinds, such as incandescence and the electric arc, or industrial tools, giving rise to works which, in their turn, are in a constant state of action and flux. “Materials speak, you just need to know how to listen to them,” as the artist is fond of saying.
As well as Ciotola Fluorescente (Fluorescent Bowl) (1968) mentioned at the beginning of Zorio’s text, the exhibition presents a series of historic works from 1968, the year of the exhibition Arte Povera + Azioni Povere in Amalfi, where Zorio first forged ties with Marcello and Lia Rumma, together with others made subsequently, designed by the artist almost as a single artwork. Displayed in various rooms of the gallery, in a sort of continuous present, the works activate an oscillation of time and space, marking a circular time in which, as the title suggests, Le memorie scavalcano il presente e attivano il future (Memories override the present and activate the future) ... “My works,” explains Zorio, “are forms of energy themselves because they are always living works or works in action, or capable of being activated in the future”.
