IT HAPPENS. Residency + Exhibition VLAD NANCĂ / LUCA RESTA

After the summer break Il Ponte gallery of Florence opens the new season with the brand-new project IT HAPPENS, curated by Paola Tognon; the project sets out to investigate contemporary visual culture, offer opportunities for experimentation and comparison between young international artists, and expand the gallery’s relations – after 50 years of activity – through intergenerational dialogue.
Each year IT HAPPENS will call artists who, following meetings, residencies and a shared period of work in Florence, will present a site-specific project for the two spaces of Il Ponte gallery. The participants of the first IT HAPPENS are Vlad Nancă (Bucharest, Romania) and Luca Resta (Italian living and working in Paris).
With no limits on materials, no obligations to share practices, spaces or languages, no need to put together a joint show, the research of Vlad Nancă on public space and its poetic and objectual resilience (between memory and utopia, by way of irksome present everyday life) meets the obsessive repetitions of Luca Resta to compose a 4-handed project filling both areas of the gallery, made of actions and ideas, images, videos, sculptures and readymades.
The objects and images passed down and repeated through the decades, recorded and reproposed by the poetic and political eye of Romanian artist Vlad Nancă, encounter the repetitiveness of mechanical, human or technological actions which delocalize the shape and function of the objects proposed by the Italian Luca Resta. Together – in name and in deed – the two artists compose the IT HAPPENS project, transforming Il Ponte gallery into a rarefied space where sharp irony and fun dominate obsessions and layers of meaning.
The meetings, long email correspondence and swapped references (from history to cooking, language to 1970s artistic and architectural research, the sets of ephemeral fashion shows to everyday objects) created a virtual and surreal platform onto which for many months the two artists uploaded research, poetics and formal similarities as well as experiences from their exhibitions and projects in Marseilles, Brussels, Paris and Bucharest. The upshot is the co-habitation of works and stories in a participatory exhibition during the period of their residency in Florence, premeditated occasion for the encounter between Vlad Nancă and Luca Resta. Like in a crossword puzzle, the exhibition will reveal words, gestures and intimate meanings nostalgias and recollections, images and actions built during the months of the site-specific project IT HAPPENS 01.