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Ph by Marina Tsaregorodtseva

It's Magic. A Beyond Experience
Spazio Millepiani, Rome | February 17 – March 16, 2022

Curator A. Muratore

Magic. An idea, more than a simple word, a door concealing an endless universe. Opening that door means penetrating a tangled jungle, difficult to ‘read’ fully, almost impossible to traverse without a quiet attitude implying reflection, observation and a slow way of moving - little by little, step after step.

Thinking about magic as a successful stunt, developed by an illusionist capable of manipulating reality by deceiving our eyes, is definitely reductive. Connected to magic, like an orchestra of satellites, there are many more concepts, uses and habits dealing, for example, with beliefs, spirituality and myths triggered, shared, passed on and followed carefully by certain communities ot groups.

Going into the Spazio Millepiani to visit the exhibition “It’s Magic. A Beyond Experience” is like stepping through that door and plunging into another dimension, where photos, digital and video works become hints, vehicles of feelings, ideas and relations.

Within this world dotted with pictures - a world that is new and ancestral at the same time - this dual temporality is found in countless references to the Renaissance as well as the Baroque art. References that are though reviewed and incorporated into other contexts and revised according to different poetics.

The strong chiaroscuro à la Caravaggio reveals a modern sacrality that has little to do with religion and it is rather close to a contemporary, pagan mystery.

The light becomes energy and is no longer embodying the divine, approaching instead the primal forces of nature and fighting against its opposites - the dark and the shadow in the first place.

The representation of the self and of ‘the other’ becomes the denial of the pictorial genre of the portrait/ self-portrait. This is because there is always something - a barrier, a filter, a shade - stopping the observer to find a connection with the observed.

Natural elements such as fog, the sunlight’s reflections or rippling water are used as visual expedients giving the image/the video its magic touch, an impenetrable mystery where finding answers to our questions seems impossible.

Myths, ancestral signs and beliefs illustrated by “It’s Magic. A Beyond Experience” are ready to explode before our eyes. Those pictures show explosions of colour that, depending on the circumstances, meet or clash; they are interpretations of everyday life viewed from a wide perspective going beyond what we are used to.

When magic breaks into our orderly and rational world, our balance is disrupted or even overturned. And we are finally ready to embrace new dimensions.

Text by Silvia Colombo

Works by Lindsay Godin; Foteini Zaglara; Thomas Francia; Nanouk Prins