Michelangelo Penso

curated by Leo Lecci

With this one-man show dedicated to the Venetian artist, the Centre of Modern and Contemporary Art returns with an innovative project to one of its fundamental missions: to host, highlight and study the main artistic expressions of the present.

On this occasion, this aim has been pursued via a collaboration with the University of Genoa, specifically with DIRAAS (Department of Italian, Roman, Antique Studies, and of the Arts and the Performing Arts) and with AdAC (Archive of Contemporary Art), which has proposed Michelangelo Penso as the representative of the artistic experiences of the ‘90s, in a monographic course dedicated to the last decade of the last century. His research is further analysed in a workshop for the students of the University of Genoa, which is held at the CAMeC during the exhibition.

Michelangelo Penso (Venice 1964), who has been working for several years at an international level investigating the possible connections between scientific and artistic research, presents in La Spezia an exhibition which has been conceived and created specially for this museum and its specific spaces.

In the first-floor rooms of the CAMeC in fact, three large installations are set up, accompanied by various works on thewall which testify to the long,elaborate genesis of the project. They are installations conceived to give a plastic, visible shape to infinite dimensions, to those little-known worlds which are explored almost exclusively in the field of scientific research: the infinitely large and the infinitely small.

Chronotope, created at the beginning of 2019 and presented here in a new layout, is a floor installation which shows the arrangement of the planets of the solar system through an algorithm, reproducing the frequencies generated by them. Pelagibacter (2019) and Roseobacter (2019) are site – and context-specific installations, i.e. created specially for the spaces of the CAMeC and inspired by the scientific study of marine bacteria. Large structures built with industrial belts and suspended in space create forms on a scale of 20,000,000:1, inspired by microorganisms discovered at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries which are fundamental for stabilising the temperature of our planet.

Michelangelo Penso gained his diploma from the Fine Arts Academy of Venice under the guidance of one of the most important 20thcentury masters, Emilio Vedova, to whose graphic work CAMeC dedicated a recent exhibition. This new exhibition is thus a conceptual bridge between past and present (the pupil exhibiting in the same spaces as the master), but also between present and future, considering how closely Penso’s work is connected to the impact which scientific discoveries have and will have on our existence, both today and tomorrow.