By Francesca Orsi
Exibart (24 january 2010)
Beatrice Pediconi, is making her sinuous "dancers," created of ink, re-appear. Last winter, at Z20 Gallery, her volumetric games were produced with black ink immersed in the transparency of water; instead, at Valentina Bonomo, Pediconi uses even more contrasting pigments: a beautiful night blue with winding apparitions of starry whites. Thoughts of heavenly vaults come easily. As they say, "never change a winning team;" at most her work evolves different nuances, but its poetry remains permanently whispered. Pediconi's work can be read as a challenge: a challenge in using such variable materials, so appreciably malleable and little amenable to certainty in the final outcome.
However, this apparent randomness inherent in the material is swept away by an underlying idea that has little to do with chance. Her works are, in fact, bearers of an almost painterly manner, as if it were the hand of the artist herself that guides her weightless figures.
Credit, moreover, goes to curator Paola Ugolini for succeeding in bringing out Pediconi's entire poetic path through an effectively calibrated hanging. One passes from small, almost radiographic images to exponentially larger prints, without however ever losing that red thread that ties the whole together.
These days the dimensions of a work participate in the final outcome of the work itself, almost as much as the concept that it conveys. And very often the dimensions are chosen according to the theory of "fill absences of meaning with a nice 200 x 160cm." This exhibition, certainly, was not conceived by someone who supports such inflationary speculation.
The 120x160 format of Untitled III aims toward the sensation of disorientation that is felt before the immensity of the starry sky; the 160 x 120 cm of Untitled XXIV almost makes the smokey column of white tempera tangible; the polaroid format, which beyond influencing the objective product of the shot also influences its content, invests the image with an almost radiographic finality.
Pediconi and Ugolini have thus rendered homage to the Valentina Bonomo Gallery with a true creative climax.
Francesca Orsi
Visited November 17, 2009
From November 11 to Dicember 10, 2009
Beatrice Pediconi - Untitled 2009
curated by Paola Ugolini
Valentina Bonomo Gallery
Via del Portico d'Ottavia, 13, 00186 Rome
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday from 11-12 and 15-19
Entrance free