Luca Pancrazzi

Galleria Emilio Mazzoli, Modena
Fino al 20 Novembre

Luca Pancrazzi’s exhibition encourages visitors to contemplate the artistic working process. The artist-image/subject-artwork relationship is first explored in two works. One, situated in the gallery window itself, is a small-scale video run on a continual loop, showing a close-up of the artist’s hands in the act of shattering a pane of glass with a hammer.

Another, in the first room of the gallery, consists of two black-and-white lightboxes depicting a sequence of blurred photographs taken from a moving car and train. These lightboxes form the “prologue” to the artist’s working process: seeking one image from reality that corresponds to the mental image he has constructed, Pancrazzi can only visualize it in a piece made up of thousands of different shots.

In the rooms that follow, large-scale acrylic on canvas works, collectively entitled Intruso-Estruso, depict cars speeding through drab freeway tunnels. Pancrazzi’s particular rendering of space and light, utilizing an array of white and gray hues, creates an out-of-focus effect and an abstraction of the image. Viewers find themselves drawn into the painting, imagining themselves inside the gloomy tunnels, peering out towards the light. This process of abstraction renders the boundary between interior and exterior less concrete, thus encouraging new ways of interpreting the facts as presented and, in turn, of perceiving the various levels of reality.

Alternated with these canvases are Pancrazzi’s sculpture-objects: chairs, lamps, and bottles completely covered in shards of broken glass. By focusing solely on their material and formal aspects, the artist has succeeded in transcending the original functional purpose of these objects.

The work that most fully articulates Pancrazzi’s exploration of the meaning of art is the video Carborandum Dub. In contrast to his other pieces, this work is completely detached from reality. In this piece—a more complete version of the video shown in the gallery window—the artist focuses the camera on the crystalline matter of the glass alone as it shatters and changes form beneath his hands. A soundtrack of music and voices, created by Steve Piccolo and produced by Gak Sato, keeps time with the rhythmic beating of the hammer.

Pancrazzi himself is not visible, but his presence—perceptible in the force behind the action and in his manipulation of time—becomes one with the spiritual essence of the physical matter, with the mystery of how things are and come to be. The result is that Carborandum Dub possesses the same sacred aura as a Zen ritual.




Marinella Paderni
Translation by Rosalind Furness