Aperçues

The title of the exhibition takes the French word aperçues (visions, glimpses), which the artist first encountered in the pages of Georges Didi-Huberman's (2018) volume of the same name. In the author's interpretation, aperçue is the glimpse of an image that appears and, before disappearing, leaves behind it the wake of a question, a memory or a feeling. The installation conceived by Nina Carini draws inspiration from the idea of a vision perceived just before vanishing, building an itinerary inside the Basilica of San Celso through five installations, conceived to generate interstices, passages, openings to timeless realities.

Rischa Paterlini explains, "Nina Carini's research is in continuous processual development and today finds particular depth in performance and sculpture. It is precisely under the sign of experimentation with a material such as stone that Nina Carini in 2020, invited by the collector Enzo Nembrini, created her first site-specific sculptural work: Venere Bugiarda. An installation where two stars dialogue with each other and which on the occasion of the exhibition is rethought by asking the viewer to reflect on the theme of beauty while also discovering the suffering of the same that will soon fade away. Nina Carini's works are always created and designed to be experienced by the viewer in total harmony with the place and the materials that characterize the spaces that surround them. The Basilica of San Celso, a sacred place built before 1000 at the behest of the Archbishop of Milan Landolfo II, entrusted to Benedictine monks and whose transformations over the centuries have represented the history of the city of Milan, is no exception."

The exhibition project channels all the expressive media that characterize Nina Carini's rich artistic production, starting with sound. The first work that welcomes the visitor right from the outside spaces of the Basilica is the sound installation Le cose in pericolo (A,B,C,D,E...) , created with texts from Simona Menicocci's Glossopetrae and in collaboration with the children of the Armando Diaz Institute and the Antonio Scarpa Institute of Milan.

We continue along the exhibition path with Venere Bugiarda 3023, an installation redesigned for the occasion and placed in dialogue with the architectural spaces that host it.

Says Davide Dal Sasso, "Movement in apparent immobility fuels Nina Carini's research: the possibility that, in their concreteness, her works nevertheless express a continuous oscillation between constancy and mutability."

In a continuous exchange between matter and spirituality, the visiting itinerary returns a vertical gap near the altar, which welcomes the work created during the residency at Fonderia Battaglia Mani come rami che toccano il cielo, and then extends to the work Senza Voce, which scrutinizes the visitor's passage from its position inside the confessional. Accompanying the exhibition is a book conceived as a true artist's project, edited by Angela Madesani and Rischa Paterlini and enriched by a text by philosopher Davide Dal Sasso. The volume, published by Allemandi Editore, traces Nina Carini's research through texts and images, with a particular focus dedicated to Aperçues.

The selection of works that make up Aperçues traces a path through Nina Carini's articulated production, placing alongside an important work from Enzo Nembrini's collection and installations specially conceived for the occasion. Suspended between a horizontal, two-dimensional approach and a vertical, three-dimensional tension, the works in the exhibition interpret the harmonious dialogue between reality and mystery, between macrocosm and microcosm, between visible and invisible.

Angela Madesani explains, "Time, the vulnerability of existence and phenomena are at the center of the artist's research: the 'forever' in contrast to the precariousness of everything are a key to interpreting the works, specially created by Carini for his first solo exhibition in the Lombard capital. An eloquent dialogue develops here between matter and language, between theory and poetry."