On Saturday 26th February at 6:30pm the Vistamare gallery inaugurates Mario Airò’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The title, “Annotazioni”, recalls the speed and improvisation of written notes, of the fleeting observation, and here it also lends the sense of a desire to stop at the dry, essential shorthand of a thing immediately grasped, even when this regards what takes place not in the external world but in the crucible of ideas, in the laboratory of visions.
Signs that are captured at the moment in which they first catch our eye, still enigmatic and suspended, referring to no context, they strain to propose and expose themselves whilst remaining true to themselves and to the multiplicity of meanings by which they are generated.
Although they seem to meander between diverse styles and materials, the works that Mario Airò has conceived and realised for this exhibition all share this distinctive trait. Distributed throughout the various rooms of the gallery, they maintain a certain lightness of touch and nonchalance and, in the rooms that house the permanent installations by Enzo Cucchi, Alberto Garutti and Gilberto Zorio, they even overlap as “neutral” (but not mute) presences, with the three works that form the series entitled “Muse”, based on fragments of the recorded voices of Schwitters, Duchamp and Beuys, whose ethereal babble hovers above our heads and accompanies our tour of the exhibition. In the other rooms more-directly sculptural presences and installations mark out our progress. In “Ierofanie” [hierophanies, or “sacred manifestations”] small objects carried in by the sea and gathered on various beaches are illuminated by an almost-imperceptible light and laid out on a page of text that has been retraced by hand. From here we move on to “Calla”, an installation formed of a gilded tube that snakes across the floor, at a certain point rising up to catch drops of water that fall from the ceiling.
Then we encounter “Nodo” [knot, gnarl or node] in which arabesques of green and blue light mix in a bundle of fibre-optic cables that stretch across the space of the room.
The lateral rooms host two works based on the act of reading and a series of photographs that document works realised by the artist on various occasions using laser and led illuminations in open spaces. Finally, outside the gallery windows “Windsurfing” reminds us of the artist’s fondness for interventions in open spaces in contact with the forces of nature: a simple leaf in a cocoon of silver wire that floats on the wind.