The Cement Garden

Name: The Cement Garden
Start: 2022-01-29 00:00:00
End: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Location: Palazzo Monti

Palazzo Monti

Brescia, Lombardy, Italy

The show

Palazzo Monti inaugurates the new exhibition season with the exhibition “The Cement Garden”, a solo show by the Italian-French artist Thomas De Falco, accompanied by a text by Paola Ugolini.

The exhibition will be open from Saturday 29 January, from 17:00 to 20:00, at Piazza Tebaldo Brusato 22, Brescia, and by appointment until 31 March.

Inspired by Ian McEwan's 1978 novel The Concrete Garden, Thomas De Falco in these new works explores the dimension of childhood and adolescence using a new and captivating color palette. The dominant colors are the primary ones: yellow, Prussian blue and red, but we also find the brighter ones such as magenta, orange, purple and turquoise which, intertwined with each other with long and complex weaving techniques, give life to pop aesthetic tapestries completely different from those previously made by the artist.

For many years now, in fact, Thomas De Falco's woven works have been the children of a close dialogue between the artist and natural elements such as trees, roots, branches and leaves; in the performances, which complete her object work, the models are always used as elements of conjunction between the inanimate world of the work and the living and vital one of plants, and the materials used up to that moment were always natural and distinguished by neutral colors, such as hemp and raw cotton.

However, with this new production, the artist leaves that world to enter a completely new phase in which color suddenly becomes the main protagonist of chromatically psychedelic works and conceptually linked to the world of the hippie counterculture of the seventies.

It is undoubtedly a "quantum" leap that is the result of a completely contemporary trauma: the covid, which the artist contracted in Paris during the first lockdown in March 2020, which resulted in forced isolation for forty long days, the fear of illness and death, the reading of coming-of-age novels and the research on color, an element never loved before, used as a tool for self-care and a means with which to escape from an anguished and sad reality.

The performative aspect in De Falco's work is also essential because it visually and plastically underlines the special interpenetration of the work with the plant world that has always been the cornerstone of his aesthetics. One of its distinctive features is to be identified in the wrapping, long strips of knotted fabric that were used to bind and connect the naked bodies of the performers to the works, thus creating a total symbiosis between humanity, nature and weaving understood as a creative act of transformation.

Finally, it is interesting that Thomas De Falco's artistic practice falls within the sphere of "feminine" activities. What is also revolutionary is the decision by a white male artist to make art using this technique and thus go to deconstruct a dominant narrative that has always considered the art of embroidery and weaving nothing more than an applied art. .