Private View: Thursday 14 November 6.30 - 8.30pm
We are delighted to announce Presente the first UK solo exhibition by Italian artist Norberto Spina.
‘Presente’, ‘I am here’, the parroted response to determine attendance at school, repeated, ad infinitum, across a giant canvas at one end of the gallery. The word itself denotes the present tense, the here and now by which we confront Norberto Spina’s work however the font in which it is written harks to a different era, a futurist type-set that became the signature of Fascism across Italy (and more broadly Europe) in the 1930/40s.
Abstracted from the monumental ossuary built by Giovanni Greppi on behalf of Mussolini at Redipuglia the painting depicts the endless steps, each engraved with the word ‘presente’ that, at the site of the memorial, lead up to a votive chapel lined by the mass graves of Italian and Austro-Hungarian soldiers who fought in the first world war. Representative of several such ossuaries built under the fascist regime the site is testament to the political sagacity of Mussolini, who appropriated the half a million soldiers who died in the first world war and used their memorial to emotionally condition the next generation of Italian soldiers. Many of the names quoted on the tread of the steps are of young men who had yet to exit their teens, the familiar ‘presente’ a literal rollcall for the dead.
It might seem that the main canvas provides a template by which to ‘read’ the exhibition, however, as is typical of Spina’s layered practice, the paintings elude the comfort of a tidy linear framework. Smaller canvases in the exhibition draw inspiration from found images, photographs taken by the artist and family albums. Incongruous objects jostle with personal mementos while contemporary iPhone snaps sidle alongside the sepia photographs of a previous generation. There is no thread upon which you can hang these images, instead the exhibition is one of disconnect, of infinite possible combinations and looping time frames.
A false wall circumnavigates the gallery space, blocking out the natural light and creating the ‘stage’ for two lone canvases that communicate along the length of the gallery. Seemingly solid, a convenient white cubed simulation of gallery space, the back of the wall is left exposed, revealing itself as a stage flat, a facade that nods to the slight of hand inherent to Fascist propaganda . There is the implication that behind the wall lies an inner sanctum of truth, invited ‘back stage’ however the visitor is, of course, presented with no answers but instead a further flotilla of visual questions.
Spina’s work is at once both inherently Italian and entirely universal. Rooted in the veiled history of his childhood the images speak to the ‘monuments’ in all our lives, to buildings, public sculptures, family albums, even to the fleeting memorial offered by social media posts. Each image holds its own ‘truth’ but layered factually, like the over-activated surfaces of Spina’s canvases, they each reveal the impossibility of any one interpretation. The work recalls the writing of Italio Calvino and his literary attempt (and acknowledged failure) to find definitive meaning.
“This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .”
Spina graduated from the RA Schools in 2024, and showed with the gallery at NADA NY in May 2024. Recent group and solo exhibitions include 'And still may I' Workplace, 2024; 'Future of loneliness' Guts Gallery 2024, 'Field of difference' Palmer Gallery 2024, 'After Reminiscence' Cassina Projects, Milan 2024; 'Vanitas' Night Café, London 2023; 'Premiums: Interim Projects' Royal Academy of Arts 2023; 'Look mum non hands' French Place 2022; 'Y1 Royal Academy School Show' Sadie Coles HQ store, London 2022; 'A path with heart' The Split Gallery 2021; 'Impronte' Fondazione Giacomo Lercaro, Bologna 2020; Residency Percorsi di riavvicinamento, Sanctuary of La Verna, Tuscany 2020; Frammenti di storia, the winners of San Fedele Prize, Fondazione San Fedele, Milan 2020.
