Veronica Della Porta

The exhibition presents 30 new works (acrylics on fine art prints) that take us into an atelier, where, at the end of the day, the essential objects for creation are set aside: scissors and brushes of various sizes, pins, containers—together they form a universe of resting tools, awaiting the next morning, when they will once again take on their “function” in the hands of the artist.

It is within this aesthetic universe that Veronica Della Porta‘s sensitive gaze takes shape. She begins by photographing the objects, elevating them, and then, through the application of color, breathes new life into each one, imbuing it with a fresh visual identity. The tools are transformed into vital elements of artistic creation—no longer mere implements, but revealed entities, imbued with new meaning, bearing history, function, and aesthetics.

As Isabella Ducrot observes in the catalog text: “How does Veronica, as a photographer, place ‘disorderly’ things in the ‘right space’? By taking pictures. Her gaze reconfigures them within their hidden meaning, a meaning only she knows. This reveals their raison d’être. Her testimony transforms objects, making brushes aesthetically reasonable, scissors reasonable, chairs reasonable.”

Key elements in a visual narrative that emphasizes their significance, transforming them into works of art in their own right, “they, the tools, first captured and then allowed to ‘speak’ as objects, are transformed into subjects, as if they were animated and alive, and colour flows along their beautiful silhouettes, almost bodies enhanced by vivid red and triumphant gold, orange, violet.” – notes Nora Iosia in her essay. “The artist’s gaze lingers on them and translates them into new forms, as if surprising them when, left alone, free of their functions, free of bonds, they converse with each other and with the space that welcomes them: and who knows then what stories are intertwined between the paper scissors with their razor-sharp points, brought to Rome from faraway Japan, and the tailor’s scissors from India, between the Chinese brushes and the pins collected in the ceramic shell […]. Countless can be these fairy tales, love stories, playful, with happy endings or poignant ones like The Tin Soldier, and Veronica Della Porta suggests their possible and infinite interweavings, because countless are the perspectives and moments in the life of the objects in an artist’s studio that emerge from a ‘discreet immensity’, not worn down by the passing of time, but rather creators of a timeless joy. The artist is absorbed in the confident pursuit of that surreal substance that composes everyday life and makes colour dress the shapes, and background whites enhance the silhouettes, to modify points of view and perspectives. These objects are thus loved and allowed to breathe, as if their presence fixed in the images were ‘the deposit of all the lives they have gone through’ and will go through, because they have an extraordinary vital energy, and they convey love and attachment like everything that exists in the world, they absorb and return the gaze of those who wanted them, kept them with care and used them happily.”