Orizzonte-Sommo-Orizzonte: Loopholes

Abstract

The exhibition consists of an installation of 21 meters of drawings 12cm high, a series of tiny landscapes included in loopholes running the gallery walls; they represent imaginary geographies at the four cardinal points. The room becomes an optical box with the spectator at the center, the inversion of Samuel Van Hoogstraten's perspective box.

Quoting Lorenzo Balbi, the Director of MAMbo Museum which presented the expo: "The large installation by Giovanna Caimmi, spatially and conceptually conceived for the spaces of the gallery, it manages to completely change a room, adapting to it perfectly, even in the corners and angularity, uniforming, fitting in the space, and at the same time becoming indivisible as if it had always existed here and should only be rediscovered, revealed. Conceived in times of lockdown and limitations, the loophole, sizeable and continuous, can be read as an attempt to escape, as a glimpse into the beyond that the artist cuts out of his own inner space, becoming a window onto the outside world, a desire to imagine a "possible outside" observable without being seen. Looking outside often means trying to escape; it means seeking at all costs a freedom that one feels deprived of; it means trying to broaden one's horizons or simply running away with one's mind. But sometimes, looking outside is equivalent to looking inside. The world that can be perceived from the long horizontal views of Giovanna Caimmi is an ideal universe, marked by the North/South/West/East coordinates, identifiable in themes (technological progress, climate change, social upheavals, natural explorations) but never exactly decipherable, as if the artist actually asked each of us to find our vision, our only possible personal external world."