Here’s why the pebble can bounce on water. Because the shape of a droplet is a perfect sphere, that’s why the bug walks on the pond’s surface. Society is liquid. If you charge the surfaces with the right amount of tension, counterintuitive footholds might surface. Angela Grigolato, Elena Della Corna, Giulia Milani, Noemi Durighello e Stefano Cescon are young artists that never met a solid society. Born in the ’90s (except for Cescon, born in 1989), they all work in Venice. The city lies in the space of detachment between the real place and the commonplace of stereotypes (which means more real/virtual surfaces and pictures can be incorporated). But it is in the dialectic space of this hiatus that the city can breathe. It can then mutate and transform, as it is never stuck in its immobility. None of these artists is originally from Venice, which introduces an element of eccentricity coherent with the heterogeneity, contiguity, mixing, overturning, and tensions between solid and liquid (or east and west) that characterize the history of this city since its birth. None of them takes Venice as the subject of their work. The stratifications, the epidermis, the transitions shape to background, the sedimentations, the concretions, the detachment, and the mutating visual grain are nonetheless present as the heritage that the city left in their practice. 

Angela Grigolato uses the scanner as a hypnotic instrument, through which the photographic eye neutralizes the optical distance applying itself to organic and inorganic materials through contact –as if it tries to hug or lick them. 

Elena Della Corna shapes the glues of the primer on the canvas and uses pigments as a sculptural material. She puts it in skins, small biomorphic masses, and solid traces. Even the work on canvas expresses a phase that doesn’t precede but comes after the extroversion of bi-dimensionality. 

Giulia Milani paints human figures and body parts (feet, hands, bellies, faces) without ever properly focusing to define volumes, the position, or the moment. Her gaze wanders around the skin of the subjects, a blurred surface, trying to contain its elusive identity. 

Noemi Durighello inhabits the canvas or paper with permanent collisions between shapes, she projects a space and a gesture or color that negates it. In this way, she shuts down the illusion of unmediated access to ordinary objects, or vice versa she reduces their proximity - as in her ink diaries made during the recent quarantine period. 

Stefano Cescon found in wax, paraffin, and stearin the metamorphic instruments to construct a sedimentary process of colors and tonal transitions which is never totally predictable, even if it is still subject to physics laws. All together, they build superficial tensions.