Bringing something to light by digging so you can see it. In Sicily, on the north-eastern side of Mount Pellegrino overlooking Palermo, there is a complex of four natural caves which take their name from the small hamlet close to them: the Addaura caves. Extraordinary is the memory that envelops and preserves in the mineral stratifications in which they were engraved, a complex of rock graffiti belonging to the Epigravettian culture of the late Mesolithic and found in the early 1950s.
A hidden treasure, set in the heart of a deep, internal, invisible dimension, where different multitudes of signs and traces are embodied in the stone. A lively enigmatic imagery, made up only of human figures positioned in a circle around two bodies with contorted, uncomfortable poses, with covered faces. Engraved around 14 thousand years ago, they are the first known example of a ritualistic representation, of a banquet, of human society. This is the story that Luca Trevisani tells, stitching together the mysterious plots of a past collective memory with a flavor that never fossilizes.
With Luca Trevisani’s solo show Fossil saladon display until October 10, COLLI inaugurates its second exhibition venue in Foligno (PG). The founder’s project Edoardo Colli was born in Rome almost ten years ago, immediately creating a hybrid dialogue of interest between art and publishing, exhibition space and publishing activity but which will now find more strength in the new headquarters in Umbria. An important step not only for COLLI which is expanding and returning to the place where he was born, giving a different identity to the industrial headquarters of the family typography similar to its design nature, but above all for the entire Umbrian artistic panorama. The project has created a new centre, a new connection with the outside, (re)discovering the potential of a territory and a city that have always welcomed and nourished contemporary artistic research since the 1970s.
Since 1997 the Addaura caves have been closed to the public. There are eleven life-size blow-ups from the series Addaura Belvedere (2018) to rise vertically in the new exhibition space, (re)creating like stone walls. Huge postcards, eternal sacred traces or at least still possible of those engravings that tell of our relationship with the environment and with each other, whether they represent apotropaic rites or erotic shamanism. The artist decides to question them, replicating them countless times through a different experimentation with blueprint printing: a pre-industrial photographic process, given by simple chemical reactions in which the sun fixes, engraves, the image on the support. Here hybridized with organic elements such as wine, coffee or tea, animal urine. Trevisani gives these rock carvings the possibility of moving, of travelling, of being able to settle or accelerate; and he gives us the chance to see them for the first time or once again.
Parallel, in the two works Crystal forest (2023) e Elegance is frigid (2023) the artist performs a similar gesture: he imprints, like a modern engraving, images relating to a political vision of nature on stone fossils. Investigating a new temporal dimension with a playful, desperate cry.
The protagonist of the exhibition, in line with the design nature of the gallery, is the artist’s book by Luca Trevisani, Fossil salad (2024), from which the exhibition takes its name, published by COLLI publishing platform and Viaindustriae publishing. A kind of atlas, a visual journey that takes shape over the years between works of art, events, situations and gestures in dialogue with the idea of the fossil and with the sincere surprise, the suggestive discovery, that its encounter generates. The pages of the book are a visual narrative like a finger that traces and retraces the gentle surface of a layer of skin, made of visual elements printed and hung on the wall. In turn dissected and reported in its fragments in the editorial body.
Fossil salad it is a collection of interdisciplinary wonders given by a set of glimpses in time, chronological accidents, joyful or disobedient intrusions, bodies suspended in history. Something surprising, brought out from a deep dimension, digging.
