Corrado Zeni

Semblance Let no one miss today Has been

Come abbiamo fatto Bird's eye He went

“As humans we live and interact across a wildly diverse set of physical spaces. We each formulate our own personal meaning of place using a myriad of observable cues such as public – private, large – small, daytime – nighttime, loud – quiet, and crowded – empty. Unsurprisingly, it is the people with which we share such spaces that dominate our perception of place ... particularly in public urban spaces we inhabit, the individuals who affect us are ones that we repeatedly observe and yet do not interact with our familiar strangers.” Corrado Zeni



The most important theoretical innovation in the visual arts in recent years is undoubtedly the concept of viewing works of art in the broader context of social relationships. The idea of the work of art as an immutable being is contested, and is viewed, rather, in relation to all the existing forms that interact with the form of the work itself.

In his earlier cycle, Six degrees of separation, Zeni was already reflecting on the dynamic potential of painting. On the basis of the well-known theory that any person may be linked with any other person through a chain of no more than five people who are acquainted with one another (so that any one of us might boast that he knows the pope, indirectly), the canvas once again becomes the site of potential recomposition, the theatre of an unexpected event: it is the magic of art that makes it happen.

The presence of the architectural element which literally reveals crossings has neither a symbolic nor a representative value: rather, it is an algorithm, a geometric figure, which does not necessarily refer to any socio-anthropological conclusions.

In Zeni’s challenge of extracting the result of painting from its merely contemplative function in order to transform it into something active and relational, the entire Crossing project poses a problem which is normally new and regards all of painting, not only his work: being dynamic and active. In addition to his paintings on canvas, a watercolour installation introduces the possibility of recomposition, of annulling distances, of manipulating given concepts such as time and space. What at first glance appear to be ordinary pairs of portraits are faces of people who really did meet and, in different ways, still share some part of their lives. Their meetings are therefore, here too, metaphors for crossings in space and time, redefinitions of other universes and, perhaps, suggestions of a different way of understanding the world. - Extracts from Crossing by Luca Beatrice