Together with APALAZZOGALLERY (Brescia), Frittelli arte contemporanea is delighted to present the exhibition Show me off. Paolo Masi welcomes Servane Mary curated by Eva Brioschi. 

The idea behind this exhibition arose from the observation of clear similarities between certain formal solutions adopted by Masi and Mary, despite the two not knowing each other’s work. Mary is younger than Masi, yet this does not determine any sense of filiation, not even unconsciously. The French artist’s work runs on its own lines, through the micro and macro investigation of the pictorial surface, while Masi invents and experiments with a range of materials and with all the freshness of a young student fresh out of the academy, only he has been doing so for more than five decades. 
Curator Eva Brioschi thus set out to mediate this exchange of outlooks, doing the honours of the host gallery, of the indigenous artist, punctuating the spaces so as to offer both artistic practices the chance to let their singularities shine, as well as seeking common ground for mutual engagement.

We might read Mary’s works through the words of Walter Benjamin “The trace is appearance of nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be.” Painting also insinuates itself into and stratifies across matter, producing effects arising from superimpositions, drippings or oxidations. Control and randomness alternate in her works, sometimes monumental – created on canvases printed and coloured with acrylics – or on pegboard panels that serve as supports for enamels and spray paint. In turn, the holes in these laminated panels become a pattern to be screen-printed onto the canvases themselves, becoming a grid serving as a backdrop for other experiments and accumulations, also reminiscent of the visual evocations of the digital sphere and its pixelated screens.

While Mary calls into question the concept of trace, Masi speaks of traces left by the sedimentation and stratification of materials, by their accumulation, their passing from hand to hand, from history to history, from experience to experience: “Stratification. Sedimentation has faint traces, complex signs, clear signs of the accumulation that is inside, that is outside. [...] History is the accumulation of the passage from hand to hand. History is the sedimentation of stroke-signs, stratified, present, contemporary” Paolo Masi (Venice Biennale 1978).
Hence, Masi also works with a strong component of randomness, for example in the choice of supports that must come into his possession through life encounters. The traces for Paolo are those that life itself draws, with its river-like flowing that leads us on a journey of on-the-road encounters, just like in the beatnik poetics so dear to him.