On Friday 7 October it opened in the welcoming spaces of Z2O projectin via Baccio Pontelli 16, the first personal exhibition of Beatrice Meoni hosted by the Roman gallery. Light everywhere is the title of the collection of paintings presented, all made mainly during this year, but even before that it is the title of a collection of poems by the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom.
By borrowing it, Meoni once again establishes its link with the suggestions produced by poetry and writing and manages to mediate effective communication through painted forms.
Already in the previous series, the artist had experimented with the linguistic possibilities of pictorial practice, and in this case he wanted to embellish the fragmentation of images with symbolic elements, belonging to secular mysticism, separated from the diachronic flow of time and abstracted from space. The titles of the works themselves refer to a distant and indefinite spirituality, neither contextualized nor referred to. The words ecstasy, levitation, invocation, hit et nuncfollow each other following the order of installation like a poem in turn and recall a private meditation and an affectivity aimed at small things.
The images are articulated as a dialogue between body and objects: hands, feet, legs surrounded by color speak with simple and everyday objects that carry common memories. In Hic et Nunc (2022) two hands emerge from a background that cancels the identity of the one who moves them. What they bring are abstract objects from a story or context. Time and space have united and thus canceled, as happens in Without title (diptych, 2022) in which the twilight once again does not identify the owner of the flowers, as if the sensations that Meoni wants to narrate were his, but at the same time potentially common to all. The artist uses bodies, or rather parts of the body, and objects that become indefinite forms, like letters of an alphabet: a visual alphabet made up of fragments that communicate the personal interpretation of the sources from which Meoni drew.
There theology of everyday life by Adriana Zarri pushes the paintings on display towards a reflective dimension, towards a faith aimed at contemplating the life of everyone and every day. A silent contemplation that mixes the poetry of Chandra Livia Candiani with the reflections of the philosopher Maria Zambrano and the sociologist Gian Antonio Gilli, placed in a very personal dialogue with painting. Meoni brings with him her training baggage: at the beginning, she collaborates with theater companies and set designers alongside her career as a painter. Through the pictorial material, the artist brings to her canvas the communicative need that the scene must have in order to mediate atmospheres and environments.
The exhibition is articulated as a series of atmospheres in a single space, the z2o project room: the idea of circularity and linearity of time taken from the poems of Cees Nooteboom is also transmitted through the setting up of the room which in turn returns the aesthetics of the fragment, dear to Meoni, mixing the materials and textures of which it is composed. The exhibition, open until 11 November, returns an immersive place, in which to abandon oneself to being everyday.
Beatrice Meoni, Light everywhere
October 7 – November 11
z2o project, via Baccio Pontelli 16, Rome
Light everywhere by Beatrice Meoni in the Roman spaces of z2o Project