Vescovi collects the water, heats it and then cools it in a long steeping process that generates an unpredictable color palette. The dyeing technique he uses to “paint” on canvases is an ancestral one wherein a substance is placed into a pot of water and heated to extract the dye compounds into a solution with the water. Through his work the imprint of memories of the landscape, climatic memories and tales of the anthropocene intertwine, posing questions on our material and environmental heritage. Awakening from a state of coma after an accident he had in 2012 constituted an important starting point in the artist’s development and his interest in the materiality of memory. The memory of the light is probably the first thing you encounter on waking up from a period of amnesia. In this sense, Vescovi’s art, although abstract, is nevertheless exceedingly representational. Through a form of “atmospheric” painting, the canvases absorb the context around them. At the opposite pole of being “site specific”, the work carries within it the specificity of the place where it was created. This process approaches that of the photographic medium as a recording device. The textile becomes like a cyanotype absorbing the landscape and the earth in its fibers. Vescovi infuses his textiles with the geological notion of time dyeing each section with pigments collected from different locations, each standing for a lyrical, geological layer. In the works produced after his move to Marseille, the technique shifts from vegetal to mineral pigments: ochers and earths extracted from the ground in the Vaucluse, Roussillon or Burgundy, not to mention from Italy, Cyprus and Morocco, impregnate the textile with a Mediterranean savor. By doing so he inscribes the work in the time of nature, paying attention to multiple notions of time. ![]() The inscription of time onto the fabric materializes in traces on the fiber and in the painting. The artist invites time to act on his canvases in the manner of acid biting into an etched plate. Time is another fundamental agent in Adrien Vescovi’s ecology of practice. Nature is not something external to the canvas nor a subject matter to be passively depicted – playing instead an active part in the process. The artist shares authorship of the work with the natural elements while accompanying the textile in its state of transformation. The various different solar radiations of UV A and B, particularly strong in the upper Alps yet invisible to the human eye, become palpable on the canvases, making evident the immersive and active role of light and the natural environment. He then hung his canvases up outside his atelier to imprint them with atmospheric agents – rain, snow, the rays of the sun and moon, and the wind – before sewing them together. Vescovi gathered wild flowers and plants which he put to work, through decoction baths, on monumental textiles of recycled cotton and linen. ![]() These works are the result of a long process of experimentation that was developed by Vescovi while he was living in the Alpine region of Haute Savoie (2015-2017), when the artist started to use atmospheric elements and vegetal components as the main agents in his work. Alluding to the main color of the sun, which is “white”, the canvases and installations part of “Soleil Blanc” unfold the many chromatic possibilities expressed by light and encourage the viewer to look beyond the hegemonically imposed “white” purity of our environment to appreciate the many shades of white, as well as the traces of obsolescence created by natural agents throughout the passage of time. The sun is the fundamental component in his body of works entitled “Soleil Blanc” (2021), in reference to the glare of light on snow. With his work he foregrounds an epistemology of the sun and of the south through an ecology of processes, materials and forms. The sun, which since antiquity has played an essential role in our utopian imaginations, is the ultimate source of energy, one that transcends geographical boundaries and is capable of healing the human condition and our environment.Īdrien Vescovi locates his interest for the sun in solidarity with nature, treated neither as a master nor as a slave, but as a material.
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