When it starts to slide…” Curated by Massimo Marchetti

In Laura Bisotti’s work representing a landscape always involves the notion of its constant transformation. We might say that in her pieces a place is always expressed in motion. Whether the outline of an island, a topographical map or the drawing of a constellation, the artist identifies the grammar of conventional signs that organises these figurations and explores its reverse as if it were the back side of a lacework. Then again, points of reference of a territory do not exist as such but in connection with the culture of the period in which they are established: their meaning is a question of vision. Thus the pictorial genre of the “landscape”, meant as a view of a natural reality, becomes a more conceptual operation, adding information and intimations to the image. In this sense Venice is an extremely fascinating work material: Venice is par excellence the place poised between reality and fancy, a city where everyone in the world has been at least once in their dreams, so it possesses to the utmost a “back side”, a reflected identity (if only in the water…). Whereas on other occasions in Laura Bisotti’s career the landscape evolved by overflowing into a narrative inlaid with fragments of text, here instead it seems to assume the appearance of a play table on which ephemeral scenarios can be installed to be projected into a fabulous time where every hypothesis is plausible. The artist’s delicate creative vision disarranges the points of reference that are supposed to be fixed and immutable, and imagines the city slowly and gradually sliding. Studies of a leisurely and serene drifting in which we enjoy letting ourselves go.