Montoro12 Gallery, in collaboration with Contemporary Cluster, Rome, is pleased to present BEE IN A BONNET, a group exhibition featuring works by Italian artists Nicola Ghirardelli, Giuseppe Lo Cascio, Lorenzo Montinaro, and Jacopo Naccarato
Montoro12 Gallery, in collaboration with Contemporary Cluster, Rome, is pleased to present BEE IN A BONNET, a group exhibition featuring works by Italian artists Nicola Ghirardelli, Giuseppe Lo Cascio, Lorenzo Montinaro, and Jacopo Naccarato
The project is developed around the work of these four artists of about the same age, who use similar methodologies and research methods. However, although starting from common roots, together the work results in a multiplicity of different relationships, expressed through collective languages and signs; the cornerstones of the artists’ research are time, form, memory and a rigorous attitude towards materials and their transformation. These artists -- as expressed in the title -- have a “Bee in their Bonnet”, an incessant desire to bring out a communality given by the desire for craftsmanship of the material and a great manual skill that allows them to shape the works communicating a kindred sensibility.
In Nicola Ghirardelli the needs of a contemporary bulimic of images are expressed through the conversion of the creative process into a methodology of research, cataloguing and a recombination of the real. Flanking the natural evolutionary process of forms, the manipulation of everyday images and the determination of spatial contexts through which to experience them, generates parallel visions of possible universes. The real merges with the symbolic and the fantastic in a quest that makes use of grotesque narratives drawn from iconographic history and images of everyday dystopia. In his work he fuses together contemporary techniques of industry and traditional art to generate sculptural works that echo dramatic images of a contemporary world with a smoky future, exploring the possibility of the laws of cohabitation of plurality. In his sculptures the idea of linearity is absent; the work, in fact, is always shared with the elements that are left to answer for their essence. Elements of our collective memory such as architectural friezes, floral textures and narrative cycles are among the most recurrent in his production, as can be seen in the Petricore series, a collection of sculptural fragments made of terracotta in oxygen reduction combined with different metals, such as iron and silver, that refer to mnemonic agglomerates.
Giuseppe Lo Cascio, on the other hand, becomes an interpreter of memory through the construction of architectural and structural elements that seem to be in a state of suspension: objects emptied of their original function, and endowed with new possibilities for accumulation. A double interpretation of memory, one short-term, fleeting and ephemeral like a wax tablet, and another memory of the warehouse, hieratic, linked to experience. Through this dialogue, the possibility of a new allegory emerges, a visual metaphor representing the emptiness of memory. Giuseppe Lo Cascio's visual research, which ranges from sculpture to drawing and installation, focuses on creating the inner instability of the individual in relation to the precarious structures of memory and knowledge with which we interact daily. Influenced by the forms of architecture and design, this exploration shows a desire to represent and understand one's condition in the world, continually questioning the integrity of knowledge construction. Elements such as temporary archives and false filing cabinets suggest the attraction and repulsion of the “celibate machine” to explore liminal zones between ineptitude and the sublime. Buildings and, more generally, living structures become metaphors for the ephemeral nature of humanity and the unstable instruments of power and preservation that individuals create in order to understand an imagination that generally pits epistemology against realism.
Reasoning about time and memory then leads us to Lorenzo Montinaro, who sees time as an allusion to a multiplicity of pasts, a memory in constant disappearance in which objects become symbols of a collective memory. Emerging from his works is the artist's strong poetic and conceptual root, which attempts to capture dying in its vital charge; through a process of appropriation and deconstruction of the object, he makes fragments, breaths, emotionality his own, which he rereads and brings back to the world's attention. The artist's actions, thus his practice, reflect the sensitivity of those who want to know and save stories and relics, known and undiscovered, from falling into oblivion. Timeless pendulums, iron and photoceramic plates, landscapes of ashes, kneelers, objects that were, this is Lorenzo Montinaro's favorite alphabet to express the sense of human caducity.
For Jacopo Naccarato it is the organicity of the human body that is the catalyst and central focus of each work, a reflection on the complexity of the human being interpreted with an alternative key, ambiguity. The unexplored is the pivot of his research; sensations and lived experiences are reinterpreted by the artist giving life to new forms and subjects that are often unknown because the human body, like forms, are mutable for him, and in them, another temporality that leaves all possibilities open, is reflected. The works in the exhibition play on the idea of desire, a desire that is often unattainable and impossible to fulfill, consequently inexhaustible and at the same time fulfilling; two snakes from above watch over the figures below. Then follows a portrait of a figure that seems to almost go through a metamorphosis in which the features of the face are no longer recognizable, molded in wood, copper and concrete; and other zoomorphic elements in fiberglass, polyurethane and wood. The mixture of natural materials, such as wood, and industrial substances such as polyurethane foam, concrete, and plexiglass is the leitmotif of all the works produced by the artist.
Nicola Ghirardelli (Como, 1994; lives and works between Milan and Tuscany). In 2020 he graduated in painting from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. In 2022 he worked as an assistant to artist Giulia Cenci to create works for the 59. Venice Biennale Il latte dei sogni. In 2020 he did the residency at Manifattura Tabacchi in Florence, at the end of which he participated in the group exhibition L'Armonia, curated by Sergio Risaliti. The artist draws from art history, iconology and mythology, appropriates elements of collective memory, forgotten, “sterile” symbols, bringing them to re-emerge in the present and giving them a new meaning. He works with various materials such as terracotta, aluminum, steel and natural elements in a hybridization of organic, artificial and mechanical materials and forms made in collaboration with local craftsmen. For the 2022 group exhibition E ci fa dispetto il tempo, in Arezzo, he presented sculptures that testify to a skillful use of lost techniques (bucchero, of Etruscan origin) and modern techniques (aluminum casting). In 2021 he exhibited in Instructions to Light Keepers, an exhibition dedicated to the turbulent and stormy present in which we live, presenting a synthetic marble work in which sculptural and architectural fragments appear as the erosion of collective memory that in the artist's practice takes on a new form. For the exhibition Ardere ardere ardere, in Verona the same year, he created a work starting with a visit to the Monumental Cemetery in Milan. Nicola Ghirardelli experiments and creates according to a Warburghian method, investigating pathosformel and the survival of images. His works bring back to the words of Marc Augè, quoted in the context of the exhibition E ci fa spetto il tempo: “art like ruins is an invitation to feel time.”
Lorenzo Montinaro was born in Taranto in 1997. He lives and works between Milan and Taranto. He graduated in Didactics and Communication of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and graduated in Visual Arts at LUAV in Venice. From January to December 2022, he was artist-in-residence at Viafarini Studios in Milan. In 2021 he participated in the exhibition “What the fuck is prosperity,” at A plus a, curated by Curatorial School, Venice. In 2022 he participated in the exhibitions “Visioni (s)velate” at Viafarini curated by Elena Bray, “E ci fa spetto il tempo” at Sottofondo Studio in Arezzo curated by Elena Castiglia, “Monument” in the Bolzano art weeks calendar curated by Nina Stricker, “Rea art fair” at Fabbrica del vapore in Milan curated by Rea, and “Ma tu rimani” at Casavuota in Rome curated by Sabino De Nichilo and Francesco Paolo Del Re. In 2023 he participated in the exhibitions “L'erba sulla polvere” at MA project in Perugia curated by Davide Silvioli, “Non rimane che volare” at Osservatorio Futura in Turin curated by Osservatorio Futura and Giuseppe Amedeo Arnesano, and “Edicola Radetzky” at Edicola Radetzky in Milan curated by Arnold Braho. In 2024 he participated in the two-person exhibition “Quasi Niente” at Contemporary Cluster in Rome curated by Lorenzo Madaro, “Dopo la fine” at Galleria Ramo in Como, “Sacro è” at Fondazione Mario Merz in Turin curated by Giulia Turconi, Address Unknown at Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan curated by Viafarini, and “Fatmah” at Contemporary Cluster gallery curated by Arnold Braho. In 2023, the City of Milan commissioned him to create a permanent monument dedicated to the 1938 Jewish census at the Cittadella degli Archivi in Milan. In 2023 he was listed by Exibart magazine as one of 222 emerging artists to invest in.
Giuseppe Lo Cascio (Palermo, 1997) lives and works between Baucina (PA) and Turin. A graduate of the Catalan High School of Art and the Level I and II Sculpture course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, he is one of the winners of the New Grand Tour 2024/2025 artistic residencies, promoted by the French Cultural Institute and the Italian Ministry of Culture. In 2024 he was artist in residence at the Artistes en Résidence institution in Clermont-Ferrand (Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes). In 2023 he was one of the assignees of the Bevilacqua La Masa 2023/2024 ateliers at Palazzo Carminati in Venice. In addition to devoting himself to his artistic practice, he teaches Plastic and Scenoplastic Disciplines at the Marco Polo and Guggenheim art high schools in the same city. In 2023 he took part in the Panorama project, a series of Studio Visits promoted by the Quadriennale of Rome. Significant exhibitions include the double show QUASI NIENTE with Lorenzo Montinaro (Contemporary Cluster, Rome); Crossing, curated by Cristina Beltrami (Palazzo Madama, Turin); Campo Magnetico, BLM ateliers 2023/24 (Palazzo Tito, Venice); KLASSE (Verein Düsseldorf-Palermo); and Young Volcano #4 (Rizzuto Gallery, Palermo).
Jacopo Naccarato (Arezzo, 1995) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, painting section, in 2021 at Prof. Caccioni's chair and in 2017 at Prof. Bertolo's chair. Before obtaining his three-year degree, in 2017, he spent a period of study in Bucharest, Romania, where he came into contact with contemporary East-European art that manipulated part of his research. After receiving his master's degree, he became assistant to Tuscan artist Giulia Cenci on the occasion of her participation in the Venice Biennale. At the same time, having returned to Arezzo, he decided to open an independent space. “Sottofondo studio” was born together with two fellow citizens (Bernardo Tirabosco & Elena Castiglia) to stimulate the city environment with contemporary art with the desire to involve artists and friends in an attempt to activate a provincial reality. He currently lives and works in Arezzo. Recent exhibitions include: GENESIS, group show at The Address Gallery, curated by Edoardo Monti - L'ERBA SULLA POLVERE, group show at MA Project, text by Davide Silvioli - Emulating humans, two-person show at Hidden Garage, Bologna - Da solo, Sottofondo studio, Arezzo (AR), curated by Elena Castiglia. He also participated in the residency at Palazzo Monti in February 2023.