A number of animals, many flowers, a yellow hand and a blue one bounce from one canvas to a different, as if operating alongside the partitions. The characters in Alice Visentin’s work barely contact actuality, clinging to a radical dimension of storytelling. amanti fabula, her first solo exhibition in London, realized in collaboration with Almanac and hosted by Sundy, is a declaration of affection for the idea of constructing house.

Colourful cutouts of flowers sprout from all corners of the gallery. In the flower known as nowhere (2024), a portrait of a kid in vivid orange bursts from the canvas and stains the whitewashed backdrop, whereas within the massive Chris Ofili and associates (2024), an orange chook perched in a blue tree friends via some figures whereas a cat leaps towards a dancing girl and a masks, kindly smiling again. I remembered seeing this very portray the primary time I met Visentin, in her studio at Gasworks, London, the place she was in residence. It was leaning in opposition to a wall on which she was projecting, with the assistance of a magic lantern, a number of photos she had painted on movie. The act of “quoting” Ofili, she informed me, had helped open up her observe to a story dimension during which completely different topics, instances, and emotions coexist.

At the moment, I used to be studying Jackie Wang’s Alien Daughters Stroll into the Solar: An Almanac of Excessive Girlhood (2023), and a passage appeared made for the event: “The primary time I caught myself pondering sooner or later anterior, or future excellent, I used to be startled by the peculiar temporal construction of the tense: what could have been, the house of the ‘imaginary actual.’ It’s the grammar of willed prophecy. The truth that this place is imaginatively accessible to me . . . is proof that one thing inside me has modified. I don’t wish to say something about ‘therapeutic,’ however I’ve learn that the longer term excellent is the language of therapeutic. I stored catching myself saying it, that writing could have saved me, and with that it was determined—I can’t be damaged ceaselessly.”¹ Temporalizing ourselves within the subsequent future doesn’t imply capitalizing on the consequence, or competing with ourselves, however recovering the time-space of the current and laying it out like a protracted carpet. I’m fairly positive we talked about this, and that Visentin insisted on the significance of that house between us and what’s subsequent. As a way to create it, she units off an archiving observe of the current, one which has no course moreover that offered by her creativeness. For instance, the identical cat showing in Amongst associates (2024) and Chris Ofili and associates acts as a a number of, reproducing itself in every portray via a very completely different perspective and context, amplifying the nonlinearity of the narrative circulation.

Throughout her months at Gasworks, the artist delved into the collections of the Bishopsgate Institute and the MayDay Rooms, which protect many of the paperwork of the feminist marketing campaign “Wages for Housekeeping” launched within the Seventies by Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa in Padua and New York. Points akin to work, childhood, and care therefore turned intertwined together with her observe, by way of a freer DIY aesthetic and as reflections on how feminism, just like the fairy story, makes use of metaphorical constructions to create a fabulation able to producing subjectivity. Because the daughter of a nursery-school trainer, Visentin readily conceives of play as an area of the potential during which to supply Wang’s “imaginary-real.” 

The smallest portray within the exhibition, Carne, carne (Meat, meat, 2024), is framed by a blue paper sheet recalling the sunny skies of childhood. It portrays a lady whose face covers nearly the whole floor of the canvas, and during which a tree turns into a nostril whereas an explosion of lights pierces via her lengthy eyelashes, as if channeling a galactic growth of her interior world. It’s a world during which I think about all of the creatures that inhabit amanti fabula might stay, after stripping themselves from these work, in search of new tales to embody.

at Sundy, London
till June 22, 2024

Alice Visentin (b. 1993, Castellamonte) lives and works in Turin. Visentin graduated from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin in 2018. Visentin has introduced solo exhibitions in Italy and overseas, together with amanti fabula, introduced by Sundy and Almanac, London(2024); The morning tide of moods, Lateral, Rome (2023); Malefate, Almanac Undertaking, Turin (2021); Planète, IIC, Paris (2021); and Prima Persona Singolare, Tile Undertaking House, Milan (2017). Latest group exhibitions embody Cosmos. The Volcano Lover, Villa Olmo (2023); Sensing Portray, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2023); Pittura Italiana, Triennale Milano, Milan (2023); Diario notturno, MAXXI L’Aquila (2022); ESPRESSIONI CON FRAZIONI, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Marcella Beccaria, Marianna Vecellio, Castello di Rivoli (2022); LXII Premio Termoli, Museo MACTE, Termoli (2021); and Artagon, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2018). Visentin acquired a Visible Arts Fellowship on the American Academy in Rome for the yr 2023, and in 2024 she was a fellow at Gasworks, London, supported by the Fondazione Memmo.

Leonardo Bentini is a author based mostly between London and Milan. He's a contributor for Flash Artwork and NERO; he has collaborated with Archive Books.