Quartz Studio is pleased to present Un’immagine ci tiene prigionieri, the first solo show in Turin by the Italian artist Giulio Saverio Rossi (Massa, 1988), curated by Alessandra Franetovich. The exhibition reflects a new chapter in Rossi’s thinking on painting as a device of critical investigation on the status of images in our current era, which is the hallmark of his poetics.

Un’immagine ci tiene prigionieri [“A picture holds us captive”] pairs two theoretically distant imaginaries: scientific illustration and the everyday observation of the urban landscape. This association reveals the coexistence of many possible views – reflected in the presence of an animal eye, the use of optical instruments, and the role of human sight – speaking to an expanded conception of the act of seeing. The eye of an Odontodactylus scyllarus (peacock mantis shrimp), the wings of a butterfly observed under a microscope, and a knife stuck into wooden boards in a city construction site. While these images are also the object of study on an iconographic level, they manifest as different forms of the gaze’s subjectivity and an equal number of opportunities to rethink the proximity and distance between the observer and the object of observation. The result is a complex interplay of references in which the viewer’s presence – only seemingly external – is also defined, becoming an active part of the exhibition’s context.

The title is a loose translation of a Ludwig Wittgenstein quote (“The picture held us captive”). The exhibition contextualizes the role of painting starting from shifts in meaning posited by the philosophical theories of post-structuralism and linguistic criticism. In the original literary source, the idea is in the past tense (“held” and not “holds”), Un’immagine ci tiene prigionieri dialogues with today’s conditions of observation in which we live as users submersed in a positivist maze, still central to the institutional forms of control over reality, stifling us by the over-production and over-exposure of visual content. The current condition of the painting medium becomes an interpretative key that reveals the processes of image construction, which in the digital age, proves increasingly problematic because of the dynamics that govern the formulation, production, circulation, consumption, and possible response to establish new forms of the ecology of the gaze.

Giulio Saverio Rossi, Un’immagine ci tiene prigionieri, 2023
oil on linen, installation views
courtesy the artist and Quartz Studio
photo Beppe Giardino