Opening on Thursday, February 20, at A+B Gallery was the exhibition Senza difese. The Road Ahead by Francesca Bertazzoni (Bologna, 1977), an exhibition that came about as part of the awarding of the Special Gallery Prize at the 2023 Combat Prize.
His research takes shape from an intimate and deep-rooted bond with the road, a silent but indispensable companion, which offers itself as a space for listening, a trace of passages and a narrative in the making. Walking, stopping, observing, collecting: each element of his work derives from the experience of the journey, from contact with matter, from the memory deposited in places.
Bertazzoni adopted walking as an artistic practice in 2020, when the limitation of movement spaces transformed the street into a territory of research and resistance. Since then, walking becomes an expressive device, a path from which signs, materials, encounters and memories emerge. In an exclusive dialogue with the asphalt - a liminal and mutable space, the place where the work is generated - Bertazzoni walks against the grain, follows the roadway line, absorbs its visual grammar and returns a plastic language. The white line becomes guiding element and boundary, margin and protection, director of his going. The path becomes a sedimentation of experiences and a collection of traces: materials such as bituminous sheathing, cold asphalt, felt, spray and gold are layered in the works, composing a material archive that feeds on the direct experience of the path and the objects and elements Bertazzoni retrieves from his past and his family history.
The exhibition will be on view until March 15, 2025 at A+B Gallery (Corsetto Sant'Agata, 22, Brescia) on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 3 to 7 p.m., or by appointment.
For information: gallery@aplusb.it / Instagram: @aplusb_gallery
