Aqua Aura. Curved landscapes

Catalog published on the occasion of the public exhibition “Paesaggi curvi” by Aqua Aura, edited by Maria Letizia Paiato and Chiara Serri, set up in Ferrara (Marfisa d'Este building – Great Synagogue of the Scola Italiana) in March – May 2019.

Preface

The Italian artist Aqua Aura, known and appreciated internationally, presents the public exhibition in Ferrara Curved Landscapes, set up in the double museum location of the Marfisa d'Este building and of Great Synagogue of the Scola Italiana, which opens up to contemporary art for the first time.

Created in collaboration with the Civic Museums of Ancient Art and the Jewish Community of Ferrara, with the patronage of the Emilia-Romagna Region, of the Municipality of Ferrara and the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah (MY), the exhibition presents a large selection of unpublished works, characterized by the encounter between the landscape genre and contemporary languages (video projections, video sculptures, 3D animation and computerized prototyping).

The exhibition therefore constitutes an opportunity to focus our gaze on the artist's research united by the common denominator of the landscape as a generator of meanings, from the first studies of 2013 up to the last offshoots with results still in progress, who collect the production of 2018-19.

The section of the exhibition set up in the rooms once inhabited by Marfisa d'Este, lover of arts and poetry, develops through the rooms of the Estense villa, each of which hosts individual works or those belonging to the same series (Museum Highlights, Empty Spaces, Scintillation, Shelters: on the very nature of light, The Farewells Rooms, The Cages, Where the Lost Things Are), along a structured path not in a chronological sense, but for thematic and formal similarities.

The section of the exhibition set up at the Great Synagogue of the Scola Italiana hosts the video projection Millennial Tears, visible for the first time in Ferrara.

Aqua Aura, invented name chosen by the artist to differentiate the current path from that conducted in the nineties, it alludes to an alchemical mutation, to a rock crystal that, infused in gold, acquires its reflection and sound.

This catalog collects, in addition to the institutional texts by Tiziano Tagliani (Mayor of the City of Ferrara) and Andrea Pesaro (President of the Jewish Community of Ferrara), the critical contributions of the curators Maria Letizia Paiato and Chiara Serri, who have chosen to read Aqua Aura's work from two different angles, or the theme of space and time.