For a joyful entropy

3 July-20 September 2015

Over the summer months, the Museum’s Project Room hosted a group exhibition, curated by Giorgia Gastaldon, which presented a wholly contemporary dialogue on the theme of "lightness" explored by Italo Calvino in his book American Lectures: Six Memos for the Next Millennium, through the works of two Italian artists - Alessandra Lazzaris and Maria Elisabetta Novello.

As Giorgia Gastaldon writes: “the concept of gaining knowledge of the world through a process that pulverizes reality and restitutes its lightness through the subtraction of weight and matter, seems to be the common thread linking the artists in this" “little exhibition”. The first, Alessandra Lazzaris, works with oxidation: corroding sheet metal with acid, she transforms the metal into rust; while the second, Maria Elisabetta Novello, masters the combustion process to turn matter into ashes, her material of choice. Both, in fact, start with real, physical materials, and yet, after undergoing a “pulverization” process, these materials become "something else", something new, something to explore and enjoy in entirely new and novel ways. The two techniques chosen by the artists to execute their work - oxidation and combustion – are both by nature irreversible, and in this way it is they who create the time line, both aware of the irreversibility of their actions on its course”.