Vistamare is pleased to present Unearth Desires, a solo exhibition by Sara Enrico at the gallery in Milan.
The exhibition includes new works from The Jumpsuit Theme series (2017 – ongoing) conceived specifically for the space. Presented at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, at OGR in Turin in 2023 and most recently at Castello di Rivoli for Ouverture 2024, this series of sculptures is a variation on the theme of one of the most iconic garments of the 20th century, the jumpsuit, which, from its invention in the Futurist period, has spanned the century with multiple political and social connotations, up to the more contemporary themes of gender equality.
“The Jumpsuit Theme is a collective portrait and the body is an implicit subject. I imagined its postures, joints and tensions, applying them to a rudimentary fabric suit, used as a formwork – container. The inert cement, poured inside, generated the feeling of a latent vitality, assigning form and weight to what would be a body seeking support, positioning, stretching or folding in space”.
In conceiving the installation, the artist focused on an architectural element that characterizes the gallery’s central hall: the large skylight. The forms rest directly on the floor, creating a horizontal landscape and evoking the sensation of a stage for a potential choreography. In a rhythm of thickening and thinning, the artist seems to allude to an environment where every presence adapts to the changing atmosphere of light.
Concepts such as dramaturgy, choreography and staging, recur frequently in the artist’s discourses and in many of the texts dedicated to her work. They refer to a writing of space that is modulated on the body and grounded in its extension and gesture. The sculptures not only record the trace of the gesture that produced them – the cuts, seams and folds of the matrix are imprinted on the surfaces – but they also generate a new gesture, releasing the vital, almost telluric forces within the material, giving the impression of a second skin, sensitive and receptive, in a relationship of reversibility between the inside and the outside, the organic and the synthetic.
The exhibition title refers to the act of discovering, of bringing to light, “like a breath eluding the body, desire manifests and comes to life in the details and tensions of sculptural forms”. The surfaces of the works solicit a ‘skin eroticism’ (to quote Bernard Rudofsky) and a reflection on the politics of the body and dress. The viewer’s body merges with the sculptural bodies—stretched out, horizontal—establishing an intimate, direct, and continuously evolving engagement. Interacting with the space, the individual body of each sculpture opens up to a collective dimension.
The Jumpsuit Theme, 2024, concrete, pigment (detail), photo © Sara Enrico