The double solo show of works by Sara Enrico (Biella, 1979) and Hilario Isola (Turin, 1976) is the fifth chapter in Greater Torino, a series of yearly exhibitions, which the Foundation has organized since 2010, focusing on younger-generation artists who have chosen Turin as the place to study
or work.
The exhibition introduces two research projects that combine painting and drawing, sculpture and installation, exploring the scope and border areas of each. The look of the observer is one of the centers of attention in the exhibition, thought of as a sort of panorama.
The research of Sara Enrico revolves around painting and the potential of its related materials – oil color, canvas, frame. The artist chooses these elements for their physical qualities, exploring their possibilities and producing a wide range of forms, for which she uses both traditional media and digital processes. The painted canvas becomes a container and a cast, while oil color is often used as glue. The passage from the status of surface to that of volume takes painting to the level of sculpture, seen as a three-dimensional transcription of the eye’s movement over the painted surface. Impressed in plaster or concrete, painting creates lens-shaped passages that are visible in the texture of the Pillows and Cactus, thick and covered with traces. In Twins, Sara Enrico’s intervention on a wall of the exhibiting space, visibility goes hand in hand with concealment, suggesting a series of reflections that are expressed in the relationship between recto and verso, original and matrix.
The interest of Hilario Isola in the possible hybridization between natural and artificial elements, landscapes and inner visions, are condensed in his recent works. 4.000 K is an installation that juxtaposes large-size drawings with a work, in which colonies of mold have grown for years on a 19th-century print. Besides inspiring the title of the series, light constitutes the conceptual core of these drawings, which depict unusual lighting devices that are somehow connected with natural micro-events. This new project is introduced by two works from past seasons that are part of a collaborative project between Hilario Isola and Matteo Norzi, in which they call into question the notion of museum and the mechanisms of vision. Elsewhere is a telescope wrapped in a plasticine mass, which hides and immobilizes it, generating a subtle play of looks and relations within the exhibiting space. Large Glass explores the underwater world as a mental place, contrasting metaphors of opacity and transparency against the background of a Duchampian reference.
