"Forte- Forse Ora Resterà Tutto Eterno" solo show curated by Irene Finiguerra
BiBox Artspace, Biella (IT) 23 May/28 June
In the history of art, still life has long been considered a minor genre, incapable — it was thought — of addressing the great themes of existence. Yet, it is precisely there, among vases filled with flowers, ripe fruits, and objects that are only seemingly silent, that art has been able to tell with poignant intensity about time, transformation, loss, and the desire to hold on to what is fleeting. Beneath that orderly and quiet surface lies a powerful symbolic language, capable of expressing deep and universal emotions. Every detail alludes to the vanity of beauty, the precariousness of life. A visual heritage that finds its most complete expression in the Flemish and Dutch masters of the seventeenth century — and that today Marco La Rocca reinterprets with a personal gaze, giving it new intensity. Maybe Now Everything Will Remain Eternal is a poetic and pictorial exploration of the still life genre. It is an intimate project, born from grief and transformed into an act of love and memory. The title, seemingly enigmatic, hides an affectionate and symbolic anagram: the word FORTE — the surname of the artist's recently deceased mother — breaks down and expands, becoming a wish, a possibility, an emotional and creative resistance to the erasing power of time. The flowers that La Rocca paints are still lifes, but also silent presences: witnesses of emotional bonds, keepers of memories. Each vase is a domestic altar, each flower a fragment of eternity held on the canvas. Painting thus becomes an act of listening and permanence, a gesture that gathers memory and transfigures it into an image. The exhibition presents a selection of works created over five years: more than fifty paintings that represent for the artist a spiritual journey, a pictorial reflection that also engages with the legacy of Giorgio Morandi. In the practice of repetition — so central to Morandi's work — La Rocca finds a method of investigation and a path of introspection. As in Morandi, every variation in the subjects, however minimal, generates new relationships between form, light, and space. Repetition is never a copy, but a discovery. It is a contemplation of the everyday, an exploration of the immutable that reveals itself as mutable. It is a search for the truth that hides in small gestures, in common objects, in flowers that wither. In addition to the paintings on canvas, La Rocca also presents a series of works on paper that combine drawing and writing. They are thoughts, notes, visual poems: a sort of intimate diary, a personal dialogue in which words intertwine with images in a play of references and suggestions. The voice of those simple, silent, ephemeral flowers — similar to the one evoked in the verses of Mariangela Gualtieri — speaks of time and care, of absence and presence, of the possibility, perhaps, that something remains eternal. Forse ora resterà tutto eterno is an exhibition that invites us to look with new eyes at those flowers that, for too long, we have observed distractedly. To discover, finally, that there is nothing more human than a bouquet of flowers that, with grace and obstinacy, tries to defy time.
Irene Finiguerra