The GAM of Turin is happy to announce the Michele Tocca exhibition. Repoussoir , winning project of the PAC2021 - Plan for Contemporary Art , promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

The exhibition, curated by Elena Volpato, was born from the desire of the GAM of Turin to acquire a group of works by Michele Tocca (Subiaco, 1983), a painter capable of observing the world with the immediacy of an interior first-timeness : with the candor of a gaze that knows how to see everything as if it were the first time, yet cultivates a profound knowledge of the mechanisms of vision, of the structures of thought and of the legacies that art hands down to us. This ability of his to be entirely in the present moment , to feel the motif in his imprint and, at the same time, to see himself seen , to monitor his every decision, to "forget by heart" in his actions the pictorial matrices that belong to past centuries , led us to imagine an exhibition that could hold together these two tensions of current frankness and knowledge of history.

A few, thoughtful, small-sized pictorial studies , created directly on nature by artists such as Antonio Fontanesi , Massimo d'Azeglio and Giovanni Battista De Gubernatis , were taken from the GAM's nineteenth-century collection and placed high up on the walls, as if they were notes ideals, while Michele Tocca's pictorial series flow along the line of vision. A chromatic distinction also separates the painting of the present from that of the nineteenth century on the wall, just as in the artist's mind, sometimes, a more or less intense shade of colour, the slightly closer perspective on the object or the more or less extreme synthesis of a brushstroke, separates his own doing from the living memory of what the plenairists were discovering between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, giving rise to true revolutions of the gaze and the emergence of historical awareness of the landscape.

Repoussoir is the title of a work on display by Michele Tocca, also part of the acquisition that GAM made thanks to the PAC2021 tender. The term repoussoir belongs to the history of landscape painting. Indicates an element placed in the foreground with the aim of constituting an obstacle , a frame, a backdrop to open vision. It is an obstacle that relaunches the gaze in depth, determining its trajectory towards the visual fulcrum of the painting.