GALLERIA CONTINUA is delighted to present, for the first time in its Parisian space from 4 February to 2 April, the solo exhibition Nunca pare de ver (“Never stop seeing”) by Italian artist Manuela Sedmach. In a series of works on canvas or wood inspired by nature, the artist urges us to look, to see, to probe her works, each with our own eyes and our whole being.
Born in Trieste (Italy) in 1953, Manuela Sedmach lives and works in Braga (Portugal). She began her artistic career in the 1970s, creating a series of works on large, dense, material canvases, depicting volcanoes, amphitheatres and lakes. In the early 1990s, the artist drastically reduced her chromatic range to three colours: black, white and sienna. This allowed her to explore in depth their nuances, their hazy and vibrant effects, which instil a constant permeability and mutability. The range of greys is clarified and...infinitely varied.
She thereby ventures towards a painting where nature, the landscape and its luminous or atmospheric changes become characteristic of her production. Her pictorial language is constructed in a contrast of temporality, between the production of the work and its contemplation. Sedmach generally uses the brushes used by house painters, as well as acrylic paint to allow for quick drying. She starts with a dark base, then builds up layers of white and sienna, guiding it touch by touch towards the light. The latter is a slower, more tranquil process. Often the artist spends several hours or days contemplating her work, “seeing” it in order to move forward.
This all-important “seeing” inspired the title of a series of eponymous works in the exhibition, in which various cloud forms seem to glide and swirl before the visitor’s eyes. Taken from a Portuguese song (Nunca pare de Lutar), the title of the exhibition reflects the artist’s passion for borrowing titles from works of art (literary, musical, cinematographic) that animate and inspire her. Thus the artist presents the work Passare al bosco, in memory of reading a 1951 book by Ernest Jünger (published in France as Traité du rebelle ou le recours aux forêts and in English as The Forest Passage) which explores the path of an individual shaping his thought and identity off the beaten track, or Heimlich, referring to the same book. The artist explains that Heimlich (“the secret”) refers to the intimate, well-protected home, the bulwark of security. This word also means that which is clandestine, and therefore close in this sense to Unheimliche (“the disturbing, upsetting”).
This quest for oneself, this winding and often perilous path, unique, confidential and yet common to everyone, is translated into ethereal or desert landscapes. They are above all a means of probing the infinite or the void, but they also reflect, in the manner of the Romantic painters, our state of mind, and that visceral and mysterious link which unites man with nature.
The clouds and vaporous atmospheres that envelop Sedmach’s works pictorially transpose the existential questions of the human being.
These suspended landscapes assimilate transparency and opacity, hiding and revealing infinite snapshots. They play with the viewer’s patience, guiding the eye, encouraging the viewer to observe each corner in detail, to amuse themselves by detecting the subtle and porous differences between each of the works presented. With no frame, no space left “in the background”, the immensity of the views spread out before our eyes. They leave an infinite or unfinished landscape and therefore in perpetual movement, depending on to the moment of looking or the moment at which they intervene.
Sedmach has participated in solo and group exhibitions in many countries, including Austria, Belgium, China, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland and the United States. She won the Pollock-Grasner Foundation Award in 1999.
Among Manuela Sedmach’s solo exhibitions we can mention Em Lugar algum (Nuno Centeno, Porto, 2022) Liminal (Alfonso Fratteggiani Bianchi studio, Perugia, 2022); La discesa contempla in sé la risalita (Associazione culturale Cizerouno, Trieste, 2022), Passare al Bosco, curated by Manfred Mörth and Olga Butinar (Stadtgemeinde St Andrä, 2018); Passare al Bosco (I Colonos, Villacaccia di Lestizza, Udine, 2017), Passare al Bosco, curated by Riccardo Caldura (Arca-Itis, Trieste, 2016), and Dove, curated by Isabella Reale (Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Udine, 2010). Among the group exhibitions we can mention Contrappunto 02 (Casa Cavazzini, Udine, 2022), My way, a modo moi (MAMBO- Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Bologna, Bologna, 2017) Corrispondenza d’Arte (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Revoltella, Trieste, 2016) and Folia Continua (Le 104, Paris, 2015).
Entrada actualizada el el 27 mar de 2023
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