Ornaghi & Prestinari: Toccante

Galleria Continua is happy to present in its Rome exhibition spaces, “Toccante”, the solo show by Ornaghi & Prestinari. Some of the most noteworthy representatives of a young generation of Italian artists, Valentina Ornaghi and Claudio Prestinari begun to work together in 2009 with a desire to develop each of their projects through dialogue and sharing. This exhibition presents a group of previously unseen works, realised especially for this occasion, that reflect on the theme of “meeting”.

The multidisciplinary approach that Ornaghi & Prestinari perfected during their training as well as theirinterest for design, architecture and art history have become part of their research. The artists’ work explores the domestic, fragile and intimate dimension of things. Ornaghi & Prestinari’s practice moves between concept and action with a particular attention to the materials and their manipulation. Delicacy, care, time, lightness and irony are the recurring themes of their works. “Mixing together pictoral and plastic figuration, reflections on conceptual art and personal life experience, we invite in an intimate universe (…) through our poetics, we are looking to give a new value to familiar acts. We force ourselves to think of things as united, to not deprive them of their complexity: to make things cohabit rather than separating them. We try to create coexistence and balance, to unite worlds that seem to be distant, to preserve polysemy. With practice, through the daily knowledge of materials, we are challenging ourselves to acquire new abilities. The final form is always the result of a refining process, of working on a specific thing until it starts to speak”, explain the artists.

The works that Ornaghi & Prestinari have conceived for this exhibition are united by the theme of meeting and a relationship with the other. A meeting that presupposes the desire to approach and make contact, as shown in “Rintocco”, where the crystal chalices positioned on a shelf throughout the day get closer together until they touch, similarly in “Sfiorare”, the diptych in which two canvases tilt so much towards each other that they touch in a corner. “The Latin etymology of the word ‘to think’ (pensare) means ‘to weigh’ (pesare). Thought weighs on us and can become heavy just like the relationship between sensory touch and what “touches” us emotionally,” the artists state before continuing, “As we read in an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy: “A weight is not necessarily something heavy. It can be light. For example, a flower petal on my hand weighs almost nothing, but I feel this almost nothing. I perceive its almost weightlessness, I know well that if I turn my hand the petal will fall to the ground, slowly, following the movements of the air. But this petal will not escape gravity anyway, even if a current of air or heat caused it to rise, it would still be a game of its own weight. As for thinking, the heaviest thought is always the lightest ... for example the thought of “being” ... or “time” ...” (from “Sfiorarsi. Intervista a Jean-Luc Nancy”, by Gianfranco Brevetto, EXagere).