DEVELOPMENT OF A PAINTING
Fondazione Querini Stampalia
May 10 2017
DEVELOPMENT OF A PAINTING
Fondazione Querini Stampalia and Bonotto are pleased to present Maria Morganti’s Development of a Painting, the permanent installation created for the Fondazione Querini Stampalia café curated by Chiara Bertola.
Considering the Fondazione’s af rmative critical and curatorial mindset regarding contemporary art, it was therefore natural to invite Maria Morganti to produce a work for the café designed by the architect Mario Botta, whom the artist measures herself against for the project Development of a Painting. The permanent installation involves the walls of this space, which are covered in fabric created and developed in close association with Bonotto, one of the most creative textile manufacturers in the world.
The challenge was to add a new ‘layer’ to the Querini collection and at the same time a new ‘layer’ to the Bonotto textile collection.
“I imagine translating the pictorial gesture of spreading oil colour onto the canvas into the Bonotto company’s practice of creating the fabric through a warp and a weft, and I translated every single layer of colour into a coloured canvas. From the canvas as the support of the painting, to the canvas as the material-colour itself,” states Maria Morganti. “If every single brushstroke of colour consists of numerous gradations, then the fabric I developed with Giovanni Bonotto is composed of many different threads which together create a single colour. From a distance, they look like large monochrome can- vasses, but when we get closer we realize that the colour consists of numerous nuances. It is the magni cation of the pictorial gesture, without mediation, without distance: it forces us to have a close and direct relationship with the colour. The work is completed in its entirety when we go to the second oor and return to the painting in the nine- teenth-century room of the museum. The circle closes and the project is activated when we recompose the reverse process in time through our perception. Our imagination returns to where things were created.”
Considering the Fondazione’s af rmative critical and curatorial mindset regarding contemporary art, it was therefore natural to invite Maria Morganti to produce a work for the café designed by the architect Mario Botta, whom the artist measures herself against for the project Development of a Painting. The permanent installation involves the walls of this space, which are covered in fabric created and developed in close association with Bonotto, one of the most creative textile manufacturers in the world.
The challenge was to add a new ‘layer’ to the Querini collection and at the same time a new ‘layer’ to the Bonotto textile collection.
“I imagine translating the pictorial gesture of spreading oil colour onto the canvas into the Bonotto company’s practice of creating the fabric through a warp and a weft, and I translated every single layer of colour into a coloured canvas. From the canvas as the support of the painting, to the canvas as the material-colour itself,” states Maria Morganti. “If every single brushstroke of colour consists of numerous gradations, then the fabric I developed with Giovanni Bonotto is composed of many different threads which together create a single colour. From a distance, they look like large monochrome can- vasses, but when we get closer we realize that the colour consists of numerous nuances. It is the magni cation of the pictorial gesture, without mediation, without distance: it forces us to have a close and direct relationship with the colour. The work is completed in its entirety when we go to the second oor and return to the painting in the nine- teenth-century room of the museum. The circle closes and the project is activated when we recompose the reverse process in time through our perception. Our imagination returns to where things were created.”
