Costanza Candeloro – Envy & Gratitude

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Martina Simeti is proud to present Costanza Candeloro’s Envy & Gratitude: the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Costanza Candeloro employs writing as a generative element and research subject. Using deconstruction as a tool of enquiry, texts newly written or appropriated are transformed into words, signs and symbols and then declined in the form of sculptures, installations and performances, evolving into a continuous process of formation. Through a praxis of intuitive cognitive assimilation, aimed at making the original content disappear, Candeloro favours compositional elements and gestures along with different types of representation, crafted in a unique artistic approach.

For Envy & Gratitude, the artist has devised a series of three handbag-lens sculptures (Urban & Provincial, Integrity & Decadence, Sincerity & Sentimentality, all 2022) and the site-specific installation Marx the Girl (2022), comprising multiple self-baked loaves of bread painted with skin make-up foundation: colour code Ivory 20. Inside the handbags, a variety of texts – taken from teenage magazines and generational publications – are enlarged by the magnifier glass, providing wide scope for deconstruction and interpretation. Along with them, fears, gender constructs, issues of care and educational bias emerge whilst surprising in terms of their affective and intimate content. Embracing material and formal ambiguity, whilst functionalising aesthetic choices, Candeloro playfully blurs her sources, calling on new forms of subjectivity to emerge.

excerpt from the text by Attilia Fattori Franchini