Shadows: Presences and Absences
LoosenArt Magazine
Silvia Colombo
The new exhibition season at Spazio Millepiani in Rome starts with the collective exhibition Shadows, open from the 4th to the 31st of January 2019 and focused around a main theme, easily deducible by its title. Apparently loaded with a mainly negative connotation, a shadow can be perceived as a missing piece, our immaterial projection on the ground we walk, we step on, on the wall we observe while walking on the street. It is something mysterious tormenting us unrelentingly; it is the immortal ghost haunting our past, present and future. Again, it is the opposite of light, the hidden side of the coin, something laying behind, besides, beyond an object, a person, an obstacle, a goal. Finally, it represents the dark side we cannot avoid, that is always there – no matter what, in spite of everything.
The pictures, shots and digital works here exhibited well respond to this topic, approaching it from different angles and showing their connection with iconographic and spiritual traditions. For example, Plato, already in the 6th century B.C., considers it as a symbol in need of interpretations (the ‘Allegory of the Cave’), while the shadow play literally uses shadows as to weave entertaining stories and characters. Then, at the end of the 19th century, Impressionism abolishes the black shade from its palette, because shadows are made with a mix of colours. A few years later, Expressionist cinema gives shadows negative nuances, as shown by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) - just to mention a few. Then, artists like Malevich (Black Square, 1915) and Andy Warhol (Shadows, 1978-1979) gives shadow a more precise and independent identity.
The Shadows exhibition is therefore a heap of all this and something more. The selected images represent a (dis)human theatre (de)populated by figures, buildings, landscapes where the word ‘shadow’ plays different roles. It embodies the perpetual contrast between presence and absence, the dialectic conflict between being and appearing, materiality and immateriality, sequences of full and empty spaces. It is represented by eternal – often black and white – bodies drifting apart and moving closer every now and then. It symbolises desperate sighs screaming in silence, hoping that wars, universal destructions, personal frustrations and depression can come to an end.
Shadows are natural phenomena connected to our endless - and delicate and lively - dimension that continues day after day. Or, again, they are spatial details progressively more important by virtue of enlargements, digital retouch, change of perspectives.
If an exhibition should let us think and reflect, here the goal has been reached: Shadows makes us travel through time along a path that continues before our eyes.
