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Mechanics of Wonder is a review of personal exhibitions of contemporary art created by Albano Morandiwhich reaches its eighteenth edition with six events, spread between the city of Brescia, in historic buildings and museums, and Lake Garda, in churches, homes and naturalistic sites. The intervention of Morandi It is configured as a “direction” of events: in the general project the artists are identified to make them interact in a peculiar way with the exhibition venues.

A sort of widespread exhibition, almost a macro installation that involves the territory, where every single event is perceived as site-specific, offering the visitor a path rich in perceptive and meditative ideas, together with the opportunity to discover surprising places often unknown to most. In the symbiosis between exhibition and site, a subtle thread of reflection seems to emerge – existential-individual and collective in the comparison with the environment and nature – which unravels between ideas more properly linked to the debate of urban origin – intrapsychic, questioning, ironic, erudite, based in the city – and approaches of mystical, emotional, magical reflection on nature, in the events based in the countryside of Lake Garda.

That is how Antonio Violetta, in the sumptuous but austere rooms of Palazzo Averoldi in Brescia,

in Intertwining he debuts with an installation in which shreds of plastic material mark a perspective pavement that leads to an anthropomorphic sculpture, enigmatic in its relationship with the vast environment: it is the viaticum to the rooms populated by sculptures – almost in the shape of material extrusions of fusion – which gradually take the form of hints of faces, evolving from the initial informal incognito to intertwine with each other in allusive dialogues articulated in space.

Meanwhile, in the headquarters of the University of Brescia – a rigorous and elegant neoclassical building, historic residence of the Tosio counts – the works of the collective Bounty Killart, in The story teacheslive in a double level of ironic reading. These are small sculptures of neoclassical inspiration: a Venus, a Discobolus, a warrior, a stele…made of plaster, ceramic, resin, which with a desecrating “pop smile” bear elements of contemporary relevance, such as a guitar rather than a washing machine or the signs of the work of the food-delivery.

Placed in sardonic dialogue with the neoclassical works present in the palace, typical of the nineteenth-century collector’s furnishings, they also refer to the overrun problem on the supposed predominance of “great art” over the “minor arts”.

The Natural Sciences Museum of Brescia, a building from the 1980s, seems to offer an opportunity to reflect on the animal world and the urban consumer society. Here Giuliana Cuneaz, it is The processopens with a series of images of animals and fantastic landscapes on D-Bond, also created using artificial intelligence: updating the fairytale illustrations – starting from the Fairy Tales of the English nineteenth century, up to science fiction, superheroes – questions the animal future in the Anthropocene. The critical theme of the “producibility” of the work of art also emerges (for the infinite combinations available with AI) which goes beyond the historical question of its “reproducibility”. The real process is an interactive installation, where the animals, or rather taxidermy of the museum, are in a column and “point” to the position where the spectator sits, as if they were approaching the Ark to enter and survive. Almost as if asking for an account of his behavior, the animals stare at the human who is filmed with them and finds his replica in the videos that project the scene from multiple angles.

From Brescia the route moves to the hills of Valtenesi, in the lush countryside from which you can see the lake, in historical places, in an environment suited to the search for spiritual accents.

In the surprising and hidden church of the Historic Cemetery of San Felice del Benaco, in the exhibition The weight of the stars, Mark Pellizzola he places “star maps” and astronomical conjunctions, hung in ancient tubs and trays, which lie below in a sort of inversion with respect to the paradise of the Saints of the frescoes around, above, as if the sacred figures were at the same time generators and generated: vivified memories of the nature-sky-man relationship.

Outdoors, in the park of Moniga castle, with Intermission, Fabio Racheli creates a sequence of polymaterial works – in which the natural elements of the countryside, stems, branches, reeds, brambles guide the compositions – which are placed in an increasing anti-perspective succession: from a pile to a sheaf to fragments of huts experiencing organic decay, until they transform into vegetal frames that frame the open panorama of the lake, as evidence of primitive ritual scenography.

This poetic progression arrives at the Leonesia Foundation, in a charming country mansion hidden in the historic center of Puegnago del Garda, home to a very active cultural center. Here, in Zero sky, Michele Zaza he primarily exhibits photographic works: iconographic studies, design sets, where the human face, bodies, hands are also transformed by painting them (in reality) until they become masks that transcend everyday life. They thus become symbols of the human condition, investigated with a reference to ancient, almost shamanic rites, in a dreamlike relationship with nature that results in installations site-specific: walls studded with wings that seem to take flight and are stopped by the material itself and by mysterious geometric signs.

At the Foundation, simultaneously with Mechanics of Wonderthere are two exhibitions that, although not strictly speaking included in the review, are connected to the common thread for thematic reasons. Miriam Heiler, in How long does forever last?, proposes works where the subtle, nuanced iteration of signs – references to nature and the roots of the culture of its mountains – generates compositions in dialogue with the space in the canvas and therefore with the environment of the rooms once used as cellars and storage for agricultural tools. They are alphabetic signs made of lines like pine needles, almost the beginnings of runes that fade into delicate colors, like flocks of birds in the sky, but also allusions to rock graffiti, ancestral and at the same time infantile memories.

In non-occasional harmony with the common thread, Dario Bellini, con Mangrovesshows essential but lively paintings that study the intertwining and insinuation into the earth of the roots of the mangroves that will then form entire islands of vital robustness.

The roots, in their symbolism of connection and interpenetration with the earth, become an existential and also psychic metaphor, while they are spellings that are at the same time linear but solid in thickness, with fascinating chromatic accords.