Francesco Arena: A postcard, a step, a line and a stone.
BASE / Progetti per l’arte presents on Saturday 19 September, from 11 AM to 7 PM, the exhibition the artist Francesco Arena has conceived specifically for the space and the reopening of activities after the lockdown. A postcard, a step, a line and a stone is the title that identifies the individual sculptural objects in a lucid and essential way establishing an intense dialogue with the idea of the creative act and with the history of the twenty two year old non-profit space, as well as with the actual visit time of a single person.
Francesco Arena's project for Base, A postcard, a step, a line and a stone, is made up of works that, as the artist himself explains, "have to do with the stratification of time, adding and removing. The postcard is the exhibition invitation and its size of 10.5x15 cm corresponds to 1:1895 of the floor of Base. The step is a parallelepiped 68cm long, the average length of my step, 10cm wide and high. It is made, contrary to all my sculptures that are based on measurement, not with a resistant material such as bronze, but with the marble mud that is produced in the processing of cutting marble. On one of the two ends of the form, on the upper face the number X 71.806 is engraved, corresponding to the difference in the number of steps I took in March 2020 compared to the same period of the previous year. These conditions were due to the quarantine caused by the world pandemic and for this reason it bears the title of Lost steps (March 2020). Furthermore, a line and a stone mentioned in the title of the exhibition correspond - the first a line - to a series of sugar packets whose contents are only half consumed by the artist during his daily coffee ritual and which, when arranged in a row, form the measure of one meter; while - the second a stone - is cut to the same width as the artist's head, and carries the phrases engraved on the two smooth faces: In my beginning is my end and In my end is my beginning. The exhibition, in its entirety, reveals itself as a broad reflection on the legacy of Modernism, as well as on the need to radically re-read the function and necessity of the public monument today. The artist succeeds in his proposal by starting from a rigorous investigation of the measuring instruments (the meter, the step, the scanning of time in seconds) which humans have always provided themselves to give order to the impetuous and unpredictable flow of life.