• Ana Valter
  • L'incubo di Colombo
  • from till
  • Tuesday - Sunday, - (closed on Monday)
Opening:
Exhibition produced by:
  • Nuova Icona
Curated by:
  • Elisa Genna
  • Vittorio Urbani
Technical assistance:
  • Emmeti impianti S.a.s.
San Ludovico Oratory:
  • Dorsoduro, 2552 (Calle dei Vecchi) - Venezia
  • Waterbus n.6, 2, San Basilio stop

Nuova Icona is proud to present the Ana Valter's solo exhibition "Columbus’ Nightmare", at Oratorio di San Ludovico.

The art installation occupies almost the whole exhibition area: by entering, the visitors will suddenly find themselves in a dreamlike dimension, composed by the contours of objects, words and animals.
Valter creates wrought-iron profiles of a giant aquarium and everything living in it: a small boat, seaweeds, waves, a strange little fish, a big flamingo, a bottle, some (apparently) scattered letters, which finally build up the sentence "according to Botswy it's just like waves", and ants.

The installation is composed by tangled draws and signs, traced in the air and, then, materialized. The spectator can relate with them; he/she can move around them and even enter and passing through.

Therefore, the sacred space becomes a container's container; Valter does not create the artwork "for" Oratorio di San Ludovico, but "with" Oratorio di San Ludovico, involving the space in her game and, still, keeping a respectful distance: a tiny ant colony is slowly wending to the altar...

The artist works with materials and themes which intimately reflect her, but, this time, she deals with a great scale project.
Also the multiples tales she tells us, consequently, are no more private and familiar, but they become an epic story, just like the Columbus' adventures discovering America, a new world which, in his mind, was extraordinary and wonderful.
Here's Columbus' nightmare, embodied by the artist and, mediated by her, by ourselves, the spectators: it is a nightmare, because the road to the unknown always presents high risks and, in this case, the unknown is composed by our dreams and imagination.

Just like a dream or an hallucination, Valter's work comes from the non-sense and the bizarre juxtaposition, taking inspiration from the surrealist psychic automatism and, in the end, represents the unceasing research of a pure freedom of expression.

The words "According to Botswy it's just like waves" is a biographic reference: a sentence by one of Valter's friend, about her work and her way of perceiving the world. According to this interpretation, Botswy (=the artist, Ana Valter) sees life like a continual up and down, representing our up and down, but it is also something more: waving, lulling, sleeping and awakening, being the boundary line between light and darkness, keeping inside an infinite number of worlds to be discovered.