A group show by the artists Arianna Carossa, Tom Pnini and Marta Roberti, curated by Alessandro Facente.

About Practice puts together three artists of the same generation whose works share the experience of having collected, during their progress, formal solutions and specific episodes connected with their making, which have changed, influenced and enriched the original intent, stimulating debate on the observation of the artistic gesture. As a chronological stratification of stories written in time, practice is therefore an argumentative substrate in its own right, which prompts the curator to critically outline a philology belonging deeply to practice, which becomes a critical voice inside the process of construction.

This joint approach of production and theory makes About Practice an exhibition that reasons on the very idea of concept, its role and position in the artwork. It is not seen as an auxiliary element that sustains the work from the outside, due to a social motivation, a political direction or one of any other nature, but as an intrinsic consequence of constant activity that develops its own theoretical dimension as it unfolds.

In a self-critical way, the work independently sets its own motivations, namely due to an urgency that is so acute as to formulate a gestural approach for itself. It does not matter if this result is ephemeral or compulsive, as long as it pertains, however, to the normality of a simply human impulse, to a specific person, the artist, whose intention is to contribute, with this method, to a universal research, the pursuit of astonishment and wonder.

“All that exists, exists in nature,” said Democritus. With this utterance, he abolishes any phenomenology that attempts to spiritually transcend nature. For the philosopher, nature is pure matter that exists as it appears. In like manner, the works of Arianna Carossa, Tom Pnini and Marta Roberti appear to the observer for the wonder of which they are made, ready for investigation due to the procedures that have made them what they are. The only possible transcendence lies in evoking all the contaminations to which they have been subjected, the other approaches that inspired them and that, one by one, have created the theoretical suppositions that have made the practice meaningful. Thus the work of Arianna Carossa, starting as an installation of a sculptural character, in the moment of interaction reveals a sudden functional nature that links up with the objectual character of design; the video tetraptych by Tom Pnini issues into the pursuit of a color shading that the subject represented finds directly at the source of the natural landscape, making his practice take on a profoundly pictorial stance; while what is fixed in the immobility of the environmental installation of the drawings of Marta Roberti actually turns out to be the vibrations and images in movement of video.

All the works, in one way or another, spring from an investigation of the perfecting, scenographic and intricate force of nature. Likewise, they approach the viewer with the contemplative spirit that exists in the observation of nature, sublimating with the gaze what has previously been a constant critique that has pursued them from the moment of their birth.

Operating as visual listening, this reciprocal dialogue between artistic production and curatorial theory has encouraged, in turn, the aim of the exhibition to contribute to the open and wider-ranging debate on observation and contemporary criticism. Theories to which John Berger, with his famous About Looking (1980), has contributed by reasoning on the relationship that exists between the work of art and the comprehension, through its observation, of the scenario of the time to which it is linked by belonging or suggestion – as in the case of the two distinct interpretations he provides for the altarpiece by Grϋnewald, separated by an interval of ten years, projecting the same image of Christ into two completely different visions of history. Instead, About Practice proposes an internal interpretation that acts in a moment prior to the achievement of the work, where a more intimate gaze is possible if it happens within the limits of time, the senses, histories, theories, fears, ambitions, reconsiderations, intuitions, impulses and miracles of its construction, investigating and paying tribute to what, in turn, springs and follows from these passages.

Giuseppe Pero Gallery
Via Porro Lambertenghi, 3T
Milan 20159 Italy
Ph. +39 02 66823916

Opening hours
Monday - Friday from 2pm to 7pm
Saturday by appointment