ARTISTS
Ludovico Bomben
Francesca Dondoglio
TEXT BY
Giovanni Burali d'Arezzo
COLLABORATION
Michela Rizzo Gallery - Venice
ON OCCASION
ArtCity Bologna
ArteFiera 2025
VUOTO-SEMI-VUOTO
30.01-01.03.2025
INTRODUCTION
PRESS RELEASE
CRITICAL TEXT: SOON
PREVIEW
APPOINTMENTS
INFO
From January 30 to March 1, 2025, Studio la Linea Verticale presents *Empty-Semi-Empty*, a two-person exhibition by Ludovico Bomben and Francesca Dondoglio, organized in collaboration with Galleria Michela Rizzo. As part of the official ArtCity Bologna program and coinciding with ArteFiera, the exhibition explores the concept of Emptiness as a generative matrix: a fertile womb that, rather than expressing sterile absence, reveals itself as a place of infinite possibilities. The exhibition is accompanied by a critical text by Giovanni Burali d’Arezzo. Abstract The exhibition *Empty-Semi-Empty* is a dialogue between absence and presence, between what is and what could be. The tripartite title suggests a generative cycle: Emptiness as origin, Seeds as latent potential, and once again Emptiness as a space ready to welcome new forms of existence. Ludovico Bomben, through his interplay of geometry and light, shapes Emptiness as a dynamic balance, where the rigor of forms gives way to invisible potential. Francesca Dondoglio, through the power of color and material, represents an intimate Emptiness, composed of latent traces that germinate in the fragility of time. As highlighted in Giovanni Burali d’Arezzo’s critical text, Emptiness emerges not as a sterile void but as a living, generative organism in constant transformation. Bomben and Dondoglio explore an Emptiness that does not merely evoke absence but becomes a space of continuous and vibrant metamorphosis. In Bomben’s work, Emptiness takes the form of cuts and luminous tensions, shaping a space charged with energy and possibility. In Dondoglio’s work, Emptiness vibrates in chromatic and material transitions, recalling the primordial dynamism of creation. As Burali d’Arezzo notes, their works exist within that fluid dimension where Emptiness and Fullness, far from being opposites, intertwine, generating new forms and meanings. Opening Reception The opening will take place on Thursday, January 30, 2025, from 5 PM to 9 PM. Event Details Title:** *Empty-Semi-Empty* Artists:** Ludovico Bomben, Francesca Dondoglio Critical text by:** Giovanni Burali d’Arezzo Duration:** 30.01.2025 - 01.03.2025 Venue:** Studio la Linea Verticale, via dell’Oro 4b, Bologna In collaboration with:** Galleria Michela Rizzo Opening hours:** Tuesday to Saturday, 3:30 PM - 7 PM Special hours during ArtCity Bologna (February 6-9):** Open daily 3:30 PM - 7 PM, with a special late-night opening on Saturday until midnight. ArteFiera 2025 Studio la Linea Verticale will be present at ArteFiera 2025 from February 7 to 9 with a booth dedicated to Alberto Colliva: Hall 25, Stand A69, Painting XXI section, curated by Davide Ferri. Stay Connected Follow exhibition updates and previews on social media and share your experience using the official hashtags: #studiolalineaverticale #emptysemienmpty For More Information Studio la Linea Verticale | via dell’Oro 4b | Bologna 📧 info@studiolalineaverticale.it 📞 +39 392 082 9558 / +39 335 604 5420 FB/IG/IN: @studiolalineaverticale
CRITICAL TEXT
di Giovanni Burali d'Arezzo
VOID AND THE HOMOGENEOUS The gesture of the arm, the wrist, the hand [of the primordial man] brings back the spontaneous essence of life […] it creates the "conception" of the homogeneous. — E. Villa, The Art of Primordial Man Artistic experience must be understood both as a material creative process attributable to the author-artist and as an experience-vision by the observer of the outcome of that process. This, in truth, applies to every aesthetic act, which necessarily presupposes the coexistence, the co-essence, of these two poles. The works of Dondoglio and Bomben exalt this polarity to the highest degree. They possess a strong sense of authorship (recognizability of style and language) while simultaneously eliciting an immediate aesthetic experience—one that is direct, de-personalizing, violently bypassing ordinary cognitive and psychological frameworks. They reach into the deepest core of our emotional substance, the most hidden and remote part of ourselves. This aura-like quality is linked to a feature that both artists share: they incorporate the void as a constitutive element of both composition and artistic conception. We are thus faced with two different developments, two practices, two languages that manifest the same origin. This shared origin—the void—emerges as an original dynamism, a precursor to the reality of symbolic forms. And this is by no means a given. In common perception, the void is absence—an absence determined by something preceding it, something that generates it. Void is the offspring of fullness. Fullness generates void. The void is a negative quality of fullness. It is sterile, it does not generate, it is the cessation of being. Moreover, we postmodern contemporaries conceive of an impoverished void—an existential void, an ellipsis in the continuity between self and world. We perceive reality as a disjointed accumulation of fragments, a fractured dimension. Bomben and Dondoglio, however, show us the opposite: the void is its own reversal. The void is the ever-active necessary condition for reality to take shape. The attributes of absoluteness and totality that we conventionally assign to the void actually refer to absolute and total fullness. Before the exhibited works, one senses the existence of an original compactness striving for its constant transcendence—a dynamic, undifferentiated totality, swollen and pregnant, demanding effort to be completed, an act of force, an energetic rupture. This primordial homogeneity—understood as the primary experience of full interpenetration between subject and object (which is, in essence, a concise definition of the aesthetic experience generated by these works)—is contiguous to what we mean here by void. Conceptually, void and total-fullness have porous and frayed margins, allowing them to intermingle. They share an undifferentiated nature. In the homogeneous, as in the void, energy acts incessantly, occupying every space. Where we believe we see a wound, a depth of anguishing nothingness, an edge where the world collapses and falls, there is nothing but a teeming of energy-matter—whether painful, sacrificial, or otherwise in its completion. In the metamorphic body of these works, there are no lesions. The dynamic of matter-energy in its primary state is at its most fluid; its configurations are void in the sense of nascent, pre-psychic, a-historical, a-topical, a-semantic, and thus, potentially full—hyper-significant. The void, not being negation, is therefore a promise, a premonition, an announcement of an arrival. Dondoglio’s chromatic transitions, the result of an intense and tormented creative process, are energy in transformation and transformative. Bomben’s slashes are bolts, electric discharges, energetic irruptions. Whether Dondoglio’s paintings are akin to medieval mysticism—one might think of Gothic cathedral stained-glass windows—or Bomben’s works engage with the sphere of contemporary religiosity, the fact remains that both contain (and transmit) a decisive component of emptiness, of voidness, as defined here. More precisely, in the works on display, the void-homogeneous is not channeled into generic forms but into ur-forms—initial, in-form, pre-forms in which energy-matter is not yet creative but creating. These works are not the void itself; rather, they are its pure, original configuration. They convey—one might say they exhibit—its matrix, its lineage. The void, clinging to them like an invisible placenta, survives, continues to act, dictates the schema, and injects tension. The composition must thus be understood as a living organism in flux, a metamorphic stage that, by its very nature, decisively negates its own essential immobility. This transformative tension gives rise, in Bomben’s work, to a form of primary symbolism—validated, moreover, by the titles assigned to his compositions—where the disruptive force, the energetic rupture, is objectified in primordial figurative elements: the sphere, the drop, the starry sky, the celestial nebula—ur-figures with a high symbolic gradient. Conversely, Dondoglio’s untitled paintings move within a pre-conceptual, proto-symbolic realm, returning the initial energetic surge in the form of light-color, its expansive dynamic, its incessant oscillation between incandescence and stillness, regulating cosmic mechanisms. Finally, these works, precisely because they carry the seed of the void-homogeneous inscribed in their genetic code, cannot be considered mere steps along a path toward something else. They do not fit into a discourse, they do not contain a paraphrasable message—in other words, they are not allegory. They are ab-solute, complete in and of themselves; they have no before or after; they exist in the atemporal and enduring hic et nunc, open to infinite possibility. As Taoist sages teach—and here, perhaps, is where an encounter with Eastern wisdom occurs—these works, born of the void, bear no traces of any kind (of history, of biography, of thought). However—and this is where Taoism ends—they are dense with psycho-corporeal residues. They are the result of a creative process in which the artist’s body dissolves into a kind of sacrifice. Indeed, the artist’s psycho-physical unity, their body, is ultimately the privileged space where creative processes are ignited. But here, the discourse shifts. We move from the aesthetic to the ecstatic, and before we realize it, we find ourselves within the realm of the sacred.
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