LOOK DEEPER AND EVENTUALLY YOU'LL FIND NOTHING
BEATRICE ZITO
Photo: Andrea Zendali
Opening 29.05.2025, 6pm-9pm
Until 28.06.2025
It would come at first glance, in order to group the diversity of the materials on display, to distinguish between visual works, installations and works of a more visibly conceptual nature, if this were not precisely the gesture that disregards what is shown here. Already the title, direct and at the same time mocking, exhorts through the gaze to otherwise reflect the relation of meaning, going beyond an attribution of it by familiarity (screens with screens, images with images, objects with objects), but above all beyond the definition of what in each of the objects is specific, beyond any of their singularity. To put it better, this singularity is given, but it is given by multiplication, by repetition and difference: whether one considers the works one by one as much as, I would say, if one forces oneself to think of them together as emanations of a particular conflict or tension. In other words: the repetition of the gaze precedes, and it is it that makes possible, the conceptual formulation of the meaning of, say, a broken glass or the marks imprinted by the weather or by the vehicles of urban cleaning. The affirmation of the singular here comes from the splitting, the quadrupling of the image. And the same, in a more evident way, happens with the mound of cups or with the casting of engraved beads, in the irony of the phrase (readable in both senses, as the giving or dissipating of the truth) that they compose, whose completeness is given only at the end of that pile poured on the ground of waste (including linguistic waste). Also clearly contributing to marking this investigation of the residual outcome of objects and utterances is the circuit of production and consumption, from crafty pastime, marked by massive forms of dispersion and intimacy. The pop (or more crafty in the case of the transfers on plexiglass) background suggested by these works seems to further increase the levels of reflection around the formation of meaning when the provenance is that indistinct and rarefied swarm consisting of identical and serial products. Repetition as a matrix of meaning is, however, especially in the echoes that reach out from one work to another: the narrative linearity - here abnormal - of the photonovel, already in itself questioned by the specificity of its medium (as well as by the grain of the individual images, by the archetype of deception par excellence to which the reactivation of Aesop’s fable refers), is even more so if the unfolding of its reel is overlaid with the chilled, interdicted continuity of the sentences on the teleprompter; equally could be said of the mimetic illusion constructed by the tale on which we can only pronounce ourselves by taking into account both its modes of deterrence and the assumptions about linguistic and temporal truth made elsewhere. The non-dialectical, therefore, but cumulative, additional juxtaposition in and between works is primarily a speculative hypothesis, as if even before the self-referentiality, each medium first of all returns to its relation to the speech, to language. And therefore makes it impossible - eventually - to sink into it, since it is only ever surface.
Text by Matteo Morea
Beatrice Zito [Pescara, Italy, 1997] is an artist and writer. She lives and works in Milan.
Her work concerns the relationship between text and image as a space of friction with reality, including visual and audiovisual recording as collections of traces that tend toward fragmentariness. Here, devices and objects are seen from an animistic perspective: within its own blackboxing, each media technology retains a form of intimacy
