Casabase

Nashira Gallery hosted the exhibition Casabase by the artist Andrea Grotto, born in 1989, from the 25th of May to the 15th of September 2023.

Since the pandemic, there has been much discussion about the concept of the home as a living space, especially given the extraordinary circumstance that has forced us to be confined within our homes for a long time. There have been discussions about light, the most correct position of furniture for inner well-being, and what colors might be most appropriate for the walls.

Less alive, however, was the debate about what a home is.

Andrea Grotto has devoted part of his artistic research to this very issue, delving into both the more strictly technical point of view and the emotional point of view and bringing back to his works the values and ideas that make a dwelling, home.

From this work originates the exhibition Casabase, the title of the unique painting on canvas installed on a coated and scratched plasterboard panel, placed at the opening of the exhibition. The painting, which in its workmanship and color is reminiscent of early human graffiti, depicts the exterior of an architectural structure. It is a kind of ideal house, sketched out, almost as if it had just appeared in man’s mind: a dwelling that is still a smoky, undefined place, but a refuge.

Leading you inside the house I proprietari del tempo, a tapestry that holds the dual function of shielding the visitor’s view, but also acting as an entrance to the gallery space, to the artist’s world, to his home.

As is already evident  from the quotation of the first two works, Grotto has the ability to handle and use different materials with expertise, ranging from fabric to canvases to ceramics. The most distinctive material he has used in the exhibition is plasterboard, which serves as the basis for almost all the works.

In the pieces on display, Grotto brings back the ‘landscapes’ caught in his domestic walls: he makes paintings in which he picks up on the textures and colors of the furnishings to which he is bound by feelings of affection and familiarity and uses objects of his loved ones to create something new and make art out of them. The geometric patterns of his mother’s jumper, the multicolored fabric of his first quilt, his grandmother’s centerpieces used as bases for ceramics and terracotta. This art related to the world of the affections then joins up with a world that is apparently distant from it, the world of alchemy and cosmology, another important part of his artistic research. This union is expressed in a large installation, created for the exhibition, which consists of used leather seats carved with various symbols.

This is how a home, not in a literal sense but in the much broader sense of a place of warmth and memories, is made art.