From April 18 through July 21, 2013, in celebration of Italy’s “Year of Italian Culture in the United States” (Anno Della Cultura Italiana Negli Stati Uniti), the Museo Italo Americano will present “Contemporaneity: Signs of Modern Times” an exhibit by the Sedna group. Sedna is made up of five Italian artists — Paride Bianco, Sylvia Cossich Goodman,  Milena Pedrollo, Maurizio Piccirillo and Ivano Zanetti — linked together by the common language of art. Though the styles and media used by these experienced artists differ, they all share the challenge of transferring the reality of nature into their respective work. Gruppo Sedna explores the meaning of art in contemporary society and questions the art making process in general. Their name is derived from one of science’s most recent and significant discoveries, the planet Sedna.

 

Contemporaneity: Signs of Modern Times
by Giuliana Donzella. President and Curator, SEDNA

Like a train which has chosen to climb a long road and at each stop has increased the number of its cars, thus the Italian group SEDNA presents itself, at this engagement across the sea, on the signs of Contemporaneity.

For those who do not know of them yet, SEDNA is a group of five artists, differing in style and form, but strongly motivated, who subscribe to “a unifying thought” defined as “a commonly shared linguistic research in which word and language are conveyed by the use of color and of mediums of every kind, to determine and define the individuality of each one”.

In their works, color has taken on “values” that have substituted “form” – their experimentation with different and more current materials allows them to move beyond the painting and the traditional shape of the picture. They do not subscribe to the often obsessive search for the “new” tout court, nor to the typical bourgeoisie vision of an out-of-date art distinguished for having adopted as significant, the cut or other forms of violence against the canvas or the installation.  The risk would have been to repeat transgressive, showy and self-referential actions.

SEDNA, instead, goes against the market logic; the search of its artists is surely “anti” or “non conforming”, rather intent to follow the mechanism of the universal analogy, because what counts is not the form, the exterior, but the content, or the project and strong thought.

There are two results from such thought which mark the “making of art” of its artists: the use of linguistic means utilized in the act of communication, in a process of abstraction from the real fact, for the purpose of realizing a true work of art, and the amplification of one’s sphere of search to the interplay of art and society, to the function of pure art, to the search for the communicative value of color.

An important and thoughtful sign which defines the identity of this group and ends by contextualizing a key element of contemporaneity – that is, the recognizability and the seriality of a gesture or of a trace – is the constant search for a process that manifests itself in perfect mimesis on continuous overlappings of color, visual games, plastic essentialities, carnal allusions; a heterogeneity of styles which reflect the references to a common philosophy and its chorality.

 

It is a question of substantial principles, entrusted to the contemporaneity of the act of communcation, rather than a creative act, which never existed, since nothing is left to inspiration, but is planned and built inside a project and behind a thought.

The signs that live in the exhibit’s works are not chalk signs, serial and easily recognizable, but signs who live and therefore change, which continually highlight their polysemic essence, connected to a new process and a new and newly significant message.

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Gruppo Sedna’s exhibit, “Contemporaneity: Signs of Modern Times”, will be on exhibit at the Museo Italo Americano from April 1 8 through July 21, 2013.