Colazione sull’erba (breakfast on the grass), the first solo show by Alice Ronchi (b. 1989, Ponte dell’Olio, Piacenza, Italy, living and working in Amsterdam) at Francesca Minini gallery in Milan is about to close, so this is the last occasion, for all those around who haven’t seen it yet, to enter the fabulous world of the young and talented Italian artist.
The exhibition, which borrows the title – and perhaps the pleasant atmosphere – from the well-known impressionist canvas, is a personal and unique creation of a dreamlike landscape, where “the stereotypical image of nature is depicted through smiling flowers, singing birds and a sun that never sets”.
Granddaughter of farmers, Alice grew up immersed in the nature, living it as a huge playground, which seems to have had a significant influence on her vision of nature, but also of urban fabric and artificial things that become original elements of her harmonious systems. Playing with titles, shapes and materials, the artist coins playful and curious suggestions: from the ambition of the small stones of Kilimanjaro, endowed with proper names, to larger configurations, to the fishes in love kissing each other depicted on grit of Turchino, passing through the “vain urban structures” of Flora, extravagant metropolitan constructions that recall the silhouettes of flowers and stems.
The light, abstract devices of Colazione sull’Erba, made of stainless steel, brass rod, bamboo and cardboards, apparently arranged in a random way, interact with the space of the Milanese gallery developing a non-linear exhibition path that looks like a narrative novel, midway between rationality and imagination, without a beginning or an end.
The show runs through 15th of March 2014.
Monica Lombardi – Images courtesy of Francesca Minini
