It is the direction in which we turn our eyes that determines the direction of time – not vice versa.
Viktor Von Weizsäcker, Gestalt und Zeit, 1942

Within the permanent collection of the Museo Novecento, which includes Senza Titolo 1988, a minimalist work akin to post-conceptual poetry, Daniela De Lorenzo presents seven completely new works, specially produced between 2014 and 2016 for the exhibition Una certa probabilità.

The Museo Novecento thus opens a new season of temporary exhibitions, after accompanying the artist in a long, painstaking journey of reflection and production lasting more than two years, which began at the same time as the plans for the museum itself.

The thread running through the artist’s production, the critique of the artist’s work and the change in perspective through time and in the natural constitution of the vie des formes is one that is of fundamental importance in the political culture of the Museum, namely that it has chosen a wonderful local artist, who is a woman. Indeed, civic collections suffer from a lack of proper female representation and, thus, the plan was to try not to replicate the motiveless partiality that existed in the past, when building public and private collections.

 Equivalenti 2015/2016, particolare

The creator of a liminal exploration that is close to sculpture, Daniela De Lorenzo moves freely between different language forms and media, such as photography, sculpture and installations, video and performance, scanner art and embroidery art. She experiments continuously with the different possibilities offered by materials, crafting solutions that are well rounded in terms of form.

Although the human body often features in her artistic work, De Lorenzo does not focus on its outer representation, but rather on the perceptions that arise from the body itself. As a medium and a fundamental parameter of a singular phenomenology of perception, the body is both the subject and object of the artist’s investigation.

Sculpture, installation, the fleeting or moving imago are the natural landscape for a complex, precise, tirelessly meticulous work that is capable of bringing art and science together in the best and greatest humanist tradition.

The works on display on the second floor of the Museo Novecento investigate the more sensitive aspects of the human body: from ceramics to embroidery, from photography to paper sculpture and video, these works affirm the delicate relationship that exists between the body, identity and perception. By condensing the memory of a gesture or evoking the physicality of an ever-absent entity, metonymy is seen in the fragments selected, be they nerves, organs or limbs. Far from constituting shreds of existence, these body parts hint at scientific testing or a mature and resolute artistic focus on the eye’s gaze.

  Una certa probabilità 2016

At the centre of the exhibition, two left hands and two right feet in peacock blue ceramic suggest a certain probability of existence. Placed on the wall, after a well-deliberated assessment of the museum spaces, they are the result of casts made from felt models. Felt is a favourite material with this artist because it is a rare, non-woven fabric that has formed freely, without the predefined constraints of warp and weft, and is present in many of her works. As always, De Lorenzo places special importance on colour. Whether it is the intense red of busts and rears, or the bluish greys of hands brushing against each other, or, as in this case, the cold bright tones chosen for clay, the colours used by the artist belong to a rare and precious palette, which is the product of wise and much-meditated research. In the case of Una certa probabilità (2015-2016), the work is inspired by Pontormo’s greens and shimmering blues, as well as sixteenth century frescoes full of gesture, ancient yet modern in their exasperation of the cerebral. So much so that hands and feet, the result of a careful process of self-observation and a skilful translation into felt, are changed into clay and fixed in a hard yet fragile material whose surface is seductive and cheekily opaque.

A hint of the sacred runs through these two unusual pairs and a collective, yet involuntary, memory emerges of religious ancestry. As in the iconography of Christus Patiens, hands and feet are joined together by a steel cable. Like barbed wire, this wrapped cable holds them together, in pairs, in a suffered, unnatural compendium like the painful union of limbs nailed to the Cross. The relaxed hands are reminiscent of surrender to death, while the feet, unnaturally stretched to the limit of distortion, evoke doubt, a readiness to take an unsteady step, a readiness to fall.

This mysterious accrochage is not imitating segregation: the wire sews, stitches, embroiders and holds together. The limbs are up against each other in an impossible, incongruous embrace, because the reproduction is manifest and conceptual. There is no mimesis biou, that imitation of nature which was so dear to the ancients and is the necessary codex of classical art. De Lorenzo's practice of the conceptual, however, leads to a reflection that is devoid of all connotations of mimesis. The hands are two right hands and the feet two left feet, hence these four elements cannot, even if that were the wish, evoke a single body or correspond to reality.

The shift from felt to clay is therefore a specific, alchemical choice, which moves the work away from reality even when it resembles reality, in a sophisticated interplay of the material and the conceptual.

This device of shifting material, so central to the artist, is also at play in the strongest feature of identity: the face.

  Figurare e Paripasso 2015/2016

In Paripasso, embroidery on canvas from 2015 with the provisional title Tre minuti, what appears to be rather a singular face is in fact oculography, the eye looking at another face, as it observes a photo portrait. The embroidery reproduces the map of the eye’s movements, paraphrasing the attention paid by voluntary sight to every detail, particularly its insistence on the eyes and two other features, the nose and the mouth, which are the fundamental agents of our sensory and cognitive functions.

Similarly, to Paripasso, Vibrante (2015), a cotton paper inlay in MDF, provides a subtle and structured representation of the artist’s scientific observation of herself to measure balance. Here too, we are following an impossible trail: attention is placed on bringing balance to a stability that is clearly dynamic. The drawings, now inlays, interpret four movements in which the artist has recorded her own centre of gravity projected onto the ground, capturing the vibration of her body in positions and situations of varying tension and static difficulty. Hence, movement, in four moments in time.

The other embroidered piece, Figurare (2016), is a somewhat unusual portrait that does not evoke a face through its muscles, but rather it outlines the nerves that convey facial expression: neurofilaments, connected to the brain through synapses, enable us to express all our emotions almost immediately. De Lorenzo patiently conducts an anatomical study, revealing that which is usually invisible to the human eye, hence, there emerges a map of agents, embroidered white on white. Thus, this potential face betrays and hides an infinity of emotions that are ready for expression.

                                Equivalenti 2015/2016

Two more near portraits are Equivalenti (2015-2016), two heads in layered cotton paper. The weighted display, presented on two inclined surfaces, never allows the viewer to take in both self-portraits at the same time, thus emphasising the importance of the eye’s gaze in time.

This work originates from photography: the artist uses the self-timer to look for a particular viewpoint. In this case, it is an extreme one, one which distorts the face until it is almost unrecognisable (the front shot is repeated from above or from below, as in the best Mannerist tradition). Next, the artist cuts out and juxtaposes layers of paper on top of and beneath the original picture. The layering in the felt sculptures are seen again in layers of paper, which, like felt, has no warp and weft and is marble white, yet porous and opaque, like ceramic clay pieces in the exhibition.

Similarly, to other works, she begins with the supposed symmetry of the face, reproducing the two sides above and below the picture, which is the starting matrix. This is the case in Contrattempo (2014), for example, which is part of the same series. In fact, the conceptual work based on the codex of symmetry betrays the fiction of faithful reproduction and the non-truth of art in the round. Infinite layers of paper held together by glue present a face in which there is a concentration of space (the central part of the face is missing, everything is concentrated on one edge), and therefore of time.

The erudite imagination is not only fired by the sculptural practices of antiquity down to the twentieth century, but also shows a particular erudite affinity with mediaeval and Renaissance sculpture, with results close to the high reliefs and sculptures of Donatello and Desiderio da Settignano.

Far from any narcissism, the artist's decision to use her own body as a parameter and model is, among other things, a matter of opportunity. The body is the instrument that is available to all of us at all times as a model for representation. However, it is also the means by which we observe, perceive and measure reality. This double metaphor thus encloses both an analytical and analogical process whereby the self is both the object of the investigation and, at the same time, the vehicle, origin and measure of all perception. Just as Pontormo used himself as a model for audacious nude studies in the mirror, capable of ‘’sceptically’’ welcoming any deformation due to his twisting or abnormal viewpoints, in the same way, Daniela De Lorenzo begins with a photographic portrait, which she uses as the foundation in which to germinate layers of material, which will render an inaccurate and ''disobedient'' three-dimensionality of reality. And the practice of art replicates yet another passage in the analogical dimension: here we go from photography to sculpture, just as, from felt, we went to the ceramic arts.

  Qui e là 2016

Through the immediacy of a gesture, the photographic series Qui e là (2016) focuses on the movement of the fingers, ineffable apparitions requiring long periods of observation. The to-and-fro contact with the scanner glass becomes ethereal, minimalist, capable of evoking the infinitely close (the effect of actual contact) or the infinitely distant, almost like a vision of the universe where fingerprints act as planets and trails of light.

                     Tune 2014, videoinstallazione

In Tune (2014), we find a similar alternating sequence. The fading series of photographs shows us the artist from behind, concealed by the wings of an ordinary stage: a studio wall, an alchemical place of transformation. A skull she has modelled in felt is in contrast with the real face, which is constantly denied, a reference to the elusive otherness of Janus. The presence of the artist/performer is focused on the bust, the only element conceded to the viewer, deliberately ambiguous and exaggerated by the striped t-shirt, reminiscent of ribbing.

Sound is a dominant all-encircling feature in the room, which is pervaded by a resonance that reaches the previous room, like the ambiguous song of a siren. Just as the search for musical unity in a choir or an orchestra allows the oboe, the violin or the piano to emerge in the formalised harmony of a concert, similarly, the presence of the human form is fluctuating and partial, in an interplay between presence and absence fatally akin to Hamlet’s dilemma.

As its soundtrack heralds, the video Tune, is no more than an evoked yet unrevealed beginning, through the continuous trying, reconciling and mediating between sound and image, in which expectations are never satisfied. In a sequence of about fifty frames, photo animation uses fading to reveal the body’s movement. The decision to put together the sound of symphony orchestras tuning their instruments underscores, as stated by De Lorenzo, "an event that has no history, in perpetual expectation...". Tune is therefore a work about time, another central feature of the artist's work: time waiting, the long time involved in embroidery, the time of transformations and the transition from one material to another, the immeasurable time of identity sought through cheekily inappropriate methods, such as the paper heads.

  Vibrante 2015

Two elements provide interesting interpretations for these seven new works and both can be clearly understood through the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
The idea of time as an essential factor, especially since space does not exist without time, and, after all, “It is the direction in which we turn our eyes that determines the direction of time – not vice versa", as stated by Viktor von Weizsäcker in his interpretation of the French philosopher ( V. Von Weizsäcker, Gestalt und Zeit, Gottingen, 1942)
The device of shifting, whereby the body, in its dual role as both subject and object of investigation, has the ability to perform those "self-perceptions" that the French philosopher cited as an example of non-coincidence between Husserl’s noesis and noema.

With her focus on time and the body – the medium through which self-perception is experienced – De Lorenzo thus generates analogical forms that are expressed metaphorically. By virtue of a specific analytical method, the metaphor changes the shapes and materials through an artistic practice that is as much scientific as it is alchemical. A practice that always plays close attention to the context, to which each piece is properly calibrated.

Daniela De Lorenzo’s intense, methodical exploration resolutely embarks on a long, courageous and difficult intellectual adventure, capable of great insight and informed investigation. This exhibition is a complicit tribute.

Valentina Gensini

Valentina Gensini : Una certa probabilità ITA
READING / Arabella Natalini : Una linea attraverso