Lettere dall'orizzonte temporale (Letters from the time horizon) is a project that the artist and calligrapher Chen Li created specifically for this exhibition. In her twenty-years practice, Li has long explored the theme of roots
through the study of writing. Her approach free from the semantic constraints of the sign gives back to the grapheme the fullness of the aesthetic figure to which she recognizes the ability to convey in the form the vision of the world of
a people in a given time. The calligraphic exercise allows her to immerse herself in the living depth of a culture, stroke by stroke to feel its breath and in the methodical repetition of the gesture of appropriating its spirit to give back
an interpretation that does not concern the meaning but which becomes a language of art and, therefore, capable of dialogue on an equal footing with contemporaneity.
For this exhibition, Chen Li retraced the temporal path back to the Etruscan root of the territory, exploring bonds and connections. Starting from the liber linteus Zagrabiensis, one of the oldest book in linen with pages, as well as
the largest known Etruscan text, Li made an apograph of it on an ancient natural fiber fabric, freeing the features from the impurities of time and technical inexperience and returning to the text a formal freshness that we feel belongs to
us. The sacredness of writing as a talisman against oblivion is here the point of contact with the spiritual, religious and ritual essence of a largely unknown people; We access it through the gesture of the artist who assumes in his practice
an ancestral priestly function of initiating us into the mystery. To this body of six works is added the apograph on ancient cotton by Cippo di Perugia, a stone stele with Etruscan writing on both sides. She entrusts them with the burden
of delivering the distant past to a hic et nunc of which it is the seed and root and to us the revelation of a gesture that from the fog of time gives us back the beauty of a sign.
https://issuu.com/barbarapavan469/docs/chen_li_catalogo
LETTERE DALL'ORIZZONTE TEMPORALE
(Letters from the time horizon)
Artist: Chen Li
Curated by: Barbara Pavan and Susanna Cati
Date: from Saturday April 9 to Saturday April 23, 2022
Opening: Saturday April 9, 2022, 5 p.m.
Venue: SCD STUDIO, via Bramante 22N, Perugia, Italy
DETAILS: from Saturday April 9 to Saturday April 23, 2022