Fabrice Bernasconi Borzì – Ivan Terranova

From an idea of Carmelo Nicosia

Under the direction of Ilaria Bonacossa, Artissima Fair organised a JaguArt 2020 event with the intention of involving the Fine Arts Academies and the most important Italian galleries in the role of juries. Ten Academies, ten galleries and several selected artists. The event took place in an atypical setting for the world of art, in a car dealership, Jaguar to be precise, and the luxurious cars were the backdrop for the works of the artists.

Fabrice and Ivan do not win, but they keep their visions. It is at this point that Carmelo Nicosia and Galleria Massimoligreggi decide to collaborate and create the exhibition Impro#1.

The exhibition, entitled Impro#1, features Fabrice Bernasconi Borzì and Ivan Terranova, in a dialogue between their different practices. Impro as improvisation, a performative improvisation that also recalls the world of music, in particular Jazz. Improvisation of two soloists, of a duo, who with two different instruments live a freedom constrained by the other. Ivan and Fabrice thus live their individuality in two, in a continuous dialogue between them and their different artistic techniques, photography and installation. It is a project conceived by Carmelo Nicosia for the spaces of Galleria Massimoligreggi. Fabrice and Ivan have accepted the challenge of trying to imagine an exhibition narrative and to trigger a game of osmosis, care and attention, of each other. Fabrice experiments with the language of photography, Ivan with installation codes.

Fabrice has studied his colleague’s photographic research, which in short, is a constant search for the territory, conceptual geographies and the territorial limits of its boundaries. All this in a relationship of controlled installation of his landscape, which can be cultural or not. The basis of Fabrice’s work, of his thinking: he is an idiot, a mediocre. He also works a lot on what it means to make art, proposing his activity as technical manager of galleries and museums, maintaining a language of the temporary and “my programming of oblivion.”

It has been just over four years since Ivan’s last concert. He still remembers well the melody of It Could Happen You, one of the best known American songs, which closed a beautiful evening of standards & originals played by the duo composed of Ivan on piano and a dear friend of his on trumpet. To quote the great Wynton Marsalis: “swing opens up doubts about one’s convictions, makes one get to the bottom of things, but also makes one respond more freely because each beat requires the musicians to reformulate the relationships between them. Even in a democracy, for a beat to be effective, the only way is to keep it united and share it with others…” he would add that for Art to be effective, it should also respect this example. To be shared, to remain free. With this in mind, Ivan decided to take on the opportunity of a bi-personal exhibition with his friend Fabrice. Exactly like that concert four years ago, how a soloist, used to thinking always and only about his own work and research, must now prepare a shared project. To confront each other on a common path, starting from very different languages, such as photography for me and installation for Fabrice, has meant having to study, investigate, experiment and make compromises. A continuous encounter/clash, similar to interplay, in which, starting from different research, we achieve the same objective.

Ivan works with two-dimensionality and photography.  He has decided to accelerate certain strategies and research that in recent years have led him to look at photography and the image not only as a two-dimensional surface, but to seek a physicality and multidimensionality, gradually moving away from the paper support and the frame. A Landscape-Scene, in which to “compose” and stage an idea.

Fabrice and Ivan divided the space, three works x three.

Fabrice’s first work, this could be is a photographic series of simple situations, objects randomly placed by someone, or something, with a potential artistic value. He has developed a narrative system that assumes that minimal, collateral, barely visible objects have a value, a connotation, the story of another, perhaps more fascinating society. He tries to handle photography, not hide it, and amplifies the impossibility of managing mass productions.

untitled, for the moment, polaroid project, collects a series of collages on polaroids, of a cultural conflict during a journey in a delimited geographical space. But the journey is faded, blurred, improbable, as he searches for the meaning of the journey, but outside the journey is not valued because the destination wins. The destination is communicated, socialised, photographed as a fetish and the polaroid camera takes care of the process.

anti-hero, they could travel in the cosmos of parody; perhaps sculptures, and the objects are annihilated by the mediocrity of the materials. Fabrice, the anti-hero, does not want to excel but to assert a blatant mediocrity and simplicity, a distance from conventional beauty and the rhetoric of language. Gravity, a precarious balance.

KIMBEL GARDEN. How deep can you dig into an image? How many stories, curiosities and enigmas can emerge from the search for what has been transcribed on the magical-alchemic surface by the photographer’s gesture and observation? So Ivan, asking himself these questions, creates the work of Giardino Kimbei. By sampling and deconstructing a Japanese photographic print from the end of the 19th century, he reflects on the very grammar of photographic language. From the original landscape, each of the samples taken becomes a new circular world on which to investigate, analyse the processes and take them to their extreme consequences. A metamorphosis carried out not to replace but to prolong and amplify in time the reading possibilities of that small sheet of paper, called Photography, on which thoughts, discoveries, dreams and fears of mankind have been sensitised.

A STRANGE SUMMER IN THE MOUNTAINS, a Christmas tree set in the enigmatic blue of contemporary civilisation. An analysis of the cultural and economic processes that transform the Christmas tree from a tree of life into a tree of gifts and consumption. First of natural origin – taken from its natural habitat, then a tree of polymeric nature, discarded at the end of its use in its place of origin. Cultural and economic processes that regulate our society, but which most of it does not know, or is not fully aware of.

SKIN. Extremely fascinated by quarries, a territory that seems to be suspended, places of fascination. pertaining to obscurity, quarries that become non-places, suspended in their indeterminacy. Eros and Thanatos, says Ivan, in the quarries creation destruction. A soft skin envelops everyday life, a place of fragility and precariousness, as well as all ecosystems.