The Shape of Ideas

In this exhibition chapter, titled "The Shape of Ideas", hosted in the magnificent spaces of Stazione Leopolda in Florence, everything originates and unfolds within the space of the mind — understood metaphorically as a stage, soft, capillary, and complex — where imagination and memory first define themselves, then entwine, and finally dissolve.

The overall image skillfully synthesizes, through the use of a rich and sulphurous palette, an endless series of events, stories, memories, and imaginary scenes which follow one another and often reappear before our eyes as increasingly evanescent, at times overlapping, at others swift, performing in a dancing and perpetual succession, tirelessly driven by the mutual desire to make space for one another.

It is in this way that Capellini grants herself the chance to recreate a new imaginal world — highly personal, constantly suspended between order and chaos, silence and noise — which nevertheless requires neither detailed explanations nor redundant captions, thus allowing for the poetic elevation of movement, color, and indefinably liquefied forms, all of which strongly characterize this latest body of work.

In "The Shape of Ideas", Chiara Capellini engages with the notion of that all-defining everything, to be understood in the manner of the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, who, on this subject, wrote: Everything a bold word, swollen with vanity. It should be written in quotation marks. It pretends not to leave anything out, to concentrate, include, contain, and own. Whereas it is only a shred of a storm.

Ultimately, what results is a haunting effusion of eleven enigmatic and paradigmatic paintings, suspended and displayed in sequence, which can only be read when looked at closely and with eyes wide open — thus revealing their magical unpredictability.

Domenico de Chirico