HAUSER & WIRTH / EXHIBITION CARLOTTA AMANZI

Bringing together works by the artist that question both the materiality of painting and the viewer’s perception, the exhibition is an exploration of painting and its possibilities—where balance is achieved in instability, forms appear but remain elusive, and the surface becomes the site of discord, a space where color, light, and matter harmonize without ever resolving.

Hauser & Wirth Invite(s) / Organized with Olivier Renaud-Clément / In collaboration with Lo Brutto Stahl

When thinking about art, we must remain attentive to places—to the silent influence they exert on our gaze. Carlotta Amanzi was born in Sanremo, between the Alps and the Mediterranean. This unique geography lends the city its familiar strangeness, offering only the inescapable frontality of this dual landscape. No way to circumvent the image, no side exits. Her origin as a painter stems from this impossible escape. From here, perhaps, comes her way of inventing spaces where depth is never given, and where distance remains an enigma. 

In her work, the world is never completely there. Her paintings keep us at a distance. In its intensity, her work seems to be born of its own dissolution. Looking at the pieces presented in this exhibition, we forget what we know of painting—grand compositions, full scenes, and overly self-assured colors. Here, painting becomes a trembling, a displacement, a slow abandonment, a surface both opaque and steeped in light, something indistinct that oscillates between presence and disappearance.  

Carlotta Amanzi studied in Bologna—known as ‘Bologna la Rossa’, the birthplace of the revolutionary fervour of 1970s Italy. But the city is not only known for its avant-garde movements, Mao-Dadaists, punk and queer scenes, and pirate radios, it is one of the most fertile geographic, intellectual, and artistic centers in the history of the Western world. Its university, the first in Europe, was founded in the eleventh century, and boasts such alumni as Dante, Petrarch, Dürer, and Pasolini. It was there, too, that a unique pictorial genealogy of ‘expressive interpretation of naturalism’ emerged from the Italian Seicento, as highlighted by Roberto Longhi in 1934[1]. This tradition, concerned with the exploration of everyday reality, extends from the Carracci brothers to Morandi. Does this mean that Carlotta Amanzi’s painting belongs to a tradition born in Bologna five centuries ago? Probably not. Or perhaps, despite itself. And yet, she paints objects as one might observe a sign whose meaning eludes us. A signpost without a road, a structure without purpose, a boat going nowhere, an isolated fragment of architecture in a composition of uncertain perspective: everything is there, placed in space, yet all resists interpretation. What remains are signs, torn from their context, emptied of all certainty. What we see is reduced to the essential: surfaces, angles, porous boundaries where the very matter of painting struggles against its own annihilation, and where the brightness of color dissolves into a grey and murky light. Forms barely emerge, and already they seem to retreat, as if wanting to escape our eye. These are not paintings of appearances, but paintings of withdrawals.  

In recent months, Amanzi’s work has distanced itself from its usual subjects. As if to tell the world—or perhaps herself—that a painting is above all, about paint. Familiar subjects and tangible references have faded away. What remains is the surface. What remains is the act of making and remaking. Exhausting the paint until it speaks for everything. It is here, maybe, that the true stakes of her practice now lie: a humble and direct contact with the medium—‘the spot of pigment’[2] that Georges Didi-Huberman evokes in the work of Fra Angelico, the very skin of the painting. In Carlotta Amanzi’s work, every element is weighed, tested, often destroyed. The painting progresses. Everything in it must find its necessity, like in a living organism[3]. But this search for equilibrium is not only a formal concern: it imposes an ethics, a way of being in the world—a life devoted to work that no one demands but that everything in her insists upon, and that calls to mind the figure of Andrei Rublev, immortalized by Tarkovsky, who is haunted by the gravity of a boundless commitment. To be a painter is to inhabit that vow.   

And perhaps this is what ultimately gives Amanzi’s painting its solemn tone, the impression of a suspended world. Amanzi shares this with an Italian tradition of shading the light of the world that goes from Uccello to Giorgio De Chirico. Her painting does not explicitly invoke her predecessors—rather, it amplifies their vibration. It echoes a sentence by Jean Genet: ‘Every work of art, if it wants to achieve the grandest proportions, must, with patience, with infinite diligence from the time of its development, descend into millennia past, reunite if it may with the immemorial night inhabited by the dead who will see themselves in it. No, the work of art is not intended for future generations. It is offered to the innumerable people of the dead.[4]’ Carlotta Amanzi paints without nostalgia, without quotations, but with a relation to painting that transcends her own time. She is, perhaps unwittingly, connected to a form of painting from another age—and speaks through it to that people of the dead whom Jean Genet evoked. 

— Paul Olivennes

1. Roberto Longhi, Momenti della pittura bolognese, Opere complete, Florence, 1973
   
   
2. Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico, dissemblance et figuration, Paris, Flammarion, 1995
   
   
3. Pavel Florensky, La Perspective inversée, Iconostase, trad. du russe par François Lhoest, Lausanne, 1992
   
   
4. Jean Genet, L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti, Lettres Nouvelles, Paris, L’Arbalète, 1958

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