In 2024, the Pastificio Cerere Foundation celebrates 20 years since its establishment with the opening of a new exhibition area – designed by the STARTT architecture studio – and two exhibitions, curated by artistic director Marcello Smarrelli: one of them is The sun also rises, Wang Yuxiang‘s solo exhibition, accompanied by a text by Giuliana Benassi. The exhibition, made possible thanks to the support of MiC and SIAE as part of the “Per Chi Crea” project, will be open to the public from Thursday, Oct. 3, until Saturday, Nov. 30, 2024.
Wang Yuxiang (1997, Anhui, China), mixing elements of Chinese and Mediterranean culture, has developed a personal poetics that makes use of highly heterogeneous materials and a formally concise visual language. His works reflect on time, history, memory and the physical valence of the materials themselves, the conceptual leitmotifs of his research, and arise from a preliminary study of places and contexts to create site-specific “visual architectures.”
For the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, the artist, in dialogue with the space, has created a path in which the works produced, connected in various ways with heat death, deeply condition the
vision and perception of the observer. As Giuliana Benassi points out: “heat becomes in Wang Yuxiang’s hands an invisible brush capable of painting on matter, revealing the depths of human existence. In his works, heat acts as an alchemist that transforms, shapes and reveals, inviting us on an introspective journey through the transformations of matter and spirit”.
The works created by Wang Yuxiang visually restore the relationships between human beings and the environment, investigating the theme of entropic death through three site-specific interventions that highlight the workings of the laws of thermodynamics, showing the viewer the seesawing transformation of matter, exaggerating the limits of transformation, composition and dissolution, and staging the delicate interplay of balances between life and death. What is the most extreme point acceptable to human beings? With this open question, the artist wants to trigger a reflection in the viewer who, through the works, is called to experience entropy as an awareness of the complex system of relationships that belong to existence: the relationship with the environment and the relative responsibility for climate change, the irreversibility of production processes and the chaos generated by the complexity of the information system.
“Through a path designed to experience different forms of entropy, the works in the exhibition – explains Marcello Smarrelli – investigate the themes of our responsibility towards the environment, the complexity that characterizes our information systems and the irreversibility generated by production processes, which push us to meditate on our condition as human beings and the meaning of existence”.
On Friday 29 November 2024 at 5:00 p.m. the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere and the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche present Scambi di stato, a meeting organised at the Guglielmo Marconi Library on the occasion of the finissage of the exhibition The sun also rises.
The artist Wang Yuxiang meets Laura Passatore, researcher at the CNR, to discuss the themes dealt with in the exhibition The sun also rises. The conversation will be moderated by Giuliana Benassi, art historian and curator.
From 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. – Guided tour of the exhibition The sun also rises at the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere. The appointment is part of the programme organised, by Associna and Guang Hua Cultura & Media Italia, on the occasion of ‘La Settimana della Cultura Italia Cina’.
[watch the video interview with Wang Yuxiang]
