October 28th – November 25th, 2018
Conspiracy of word and image is the eighth exhibition organized by the Ceretto family and consolidates their passion for contemporary art and their desire to involve and bring to Alba works by international artists.
Lynn and Patti, Patti and Lynn are united by some strange and unusual tie. Part of this tie is their shared spirit of lyrical elegance. And part is the sensation their work gives of a density resistant to unraveling – as if one were being initiated into sacred mysteries for which no explanation will suffice.
Now comes their conspiracy. One aspect of a conspiracy can be thought of as a joint effort to a particular end. In this case, after more than forty years of increasing friendship, these women wanted to make something together. The result is this marriage of handwriting and photography born after an exhibition by Lynn Davis in Philip Johnson's Glass House in Connecticut, where Patti Smith also took part.
Lynn’s photographs have an intensity of presence due not only to the way she frames an image but also due to its size and the perfection of the surface of the print. Choosing five of her photographs and giving them to Patti was an act of trust. Lynn was secure that whatever Patti would do, it having been agreed beforehand that Patti was going to write on them, would be a deep and thoughtful response. Thus it became that Patti’s calligraphy wove with medieval intensity, words of her own and words of other poets, spells and runic inscriptions over the images.
These two women lead us places we would not have gone without their conspiring. The journey proceeds, twisting and turning, and we follow the multiple narratives and complex visual stories. Something ending. Something beginning.
