Jeanine Brito, Linda Carrara, Lulù Nuti

June 29 – September 17, 2022

A project curate by Chiara Onestini

with the collaboration of Valeria Schäfer

Opening Wednesday June 29, 2022

From 6pm to 9pm

On the occasion of its first opening, SOTTO is pleased to present There is water sleeping at the bottom of each memory: a project that collects the researches of the artists Jeanine Brito (*1993), Linda Carrara (*1984) and Lulù Nuti (*1988). On show, on the lower floor of the Renata Fabbri’s gal-lery, is a selection of paintings and sculptures that explore the act of diving – into the intimate me-mories, into the matter that makes up the world, into the places we inhabit – alluding to the depth of the exhibition context in which they are located.

Gaston Bachelard writes in L’eau et les rêves (1942) – the essay that has inspired the name of the exhibition – that “to dream deeply you have to dream with the matter”. The French philosopher uses these words to refer to the moment in which our imagination turns the matter of a natural element – in this case, water – into the free matter of the dream and the artistic creation. Comparing the diver-sity of the three expressive languages, the exhibition aims at highlighting the common intention to hold back and give shape, through the artistic gesture, to this ephemeral and silent mutation. Taking us into our deepest subconscious, into the bowels of the earth, into the recesses of physical and mental landscapes, the works on show look into the liquid and oneiric nature of the thought, in a dia-logue full of visual affinities and conceptual links.

Jeanine Brito is an artist and designer based in Toronto, who develops her research around the themes of memory, decadence and desire by means of the representation of still lifes and self-portraits. Her paintings recall personal memories, fantasies and fragments of everyday life, which crystalized through the pictorial medium, generate imaginative and surreal settings. Marked by the presence of unusual and unexpected elements – a peach tied up in a bow, a fish in a bouquet of ro-ses, an elegant gloved hand – Brito’s works question the reliability of our memory, pointing out its illusory and fallacious nature. By placing herself inside seductive and enchanting scenarios, the ar-tist engages with self representation, asking herself how much of this corresponds to reality and, on the other hand, how much it is the result of the imaginative process able to twist our perception of ourselves and our memories. In the attempt to store the latter, Brito captures ambiguous and sophi-sticated details, sweetening them and coating them in refined nostalgia.

Linda Carrara’s works are made up of different pictorial levels, as far as time, light, matter and vi-sual logic are concerned. They are layered and overlapping, generating worlds which apparently seem coherent and univocal. If at first sight, her paintings evoke, practically miming, the surrounding reality, it is only by getting closer to them – entering into relation with the pictorial surface – that de-tails and fragments of reality gradually lose their clarity, turning into abstraction of gestures, traces, modes and pictorial experiences.

Balanced between reality and illusion, Carrara questions the pictorial medium portraying it as the subject a new figurative logic that asks the painting matter to turn into something else: without forci-bly modeling the painting into a mimesis of the visible, but opening it up to the imagination and chance. Defined as “hyper realistic”, Carrara’s Frottage works are 1:1 footprints of objects and landscapes: true scans of the reality capable of giving back details that would otherwise be difficult to grasp with the naked eye. These compositions of layers and delicate shades of colors – which never clearly reveal the nature behind the canvas – give life to epiphanic and ambiguous realities. Similar to aerial views of landscapes of the earth and lunar crusts, sea floors and enlargements of small natural particles, Carrara’s works generate in the viewers a sense of poetic confusion. Disse-minated with tiny hints, voids and silences, they invite us to explore mysterious and intricate places, which are imagined or yet to be explored, but in any case all oriented towards an indefinite anywhe-re.

Starting from the strong conviction of the intelligence of matter and its ability to self transform and go beyond the limits of language, Lulù Nuti creates sculptures and installations that question our per-ception of reality, the transformation of our habits, and our relationship with nature and the environ-ment. Featuring a subtle duality between power and absence, resistance and vulnerability, her works interpret the sentiments of responsibility and impotence that our era provokes in the human being. Calcare il Mondo is a perfect example: a corpus of works realized on the basis of the explora-tion of building material – mainly plaster and cement – and their environmental impact. Presented through a scientific approach similar to that of a geo-engineer, who is faced with climate change, the work is made up of a series of negative dies of the world. Created by modeling portions of the latter and by casting ductile materials onto them, the works retain on their surface the allusive chromatic marks and imprints of the seas and oceans. No longer concave, but convex, Nuti presents the world to us as a dug-out shell that has been emptied of its context. Taking us directly into its bowels, the artist turns around the conventional point of view, questioning our role as inhabitants and spectators of a world in continuous evolution. As stated in the title, Nuti manipulates the earth “to reproduce it elsewhere”, to think poetically and ideally about a new circular system where works of art are safe-guarding the shape of our world.

Press Office: Sara Zolla

press@sarazolla.com | Tel. 346-8457982

SOTTO Project Room

Renata Fabbri arte contemporanea

Via A. Stoppani 15/c, Milano

Instagram: @sotto_projectroom

Email: info@renatafabbri.it