ALBUM DI FAMIGLIA

Valentina De’ Mathà

curated by Giuliana Montrasio and Beatrice Zanello

OPENING
February 25th, from 5 to 8 PM
Piazza Cioccaro 11, LUGANO

February 26th – May 30th, 2025 

Galleria Allegra Ravizza is pleased to present “Album di Famiglia,” the first solo exhibition of the Italo-Swiss artist Valentina De’ Mathà (Avezzano, 1981), hosted at the gallery’s Lugano location. The exhibition will open on Tuesday, February 25th at 5.00 PM at the gallery’s new venue at Piazza Cioccaro 11, Lugano, in the presence of the artist, and will remain open to the public until May 30, 2025.
The exhibition will feature around twenty works by the artist, some of which were created specifically for this solo show, all united by a common thread: memory, emotional recollection, and the collective unconscious.

The art of Valentina De’ Mathà, born in Abruzzo and adopted by Ticino, aims to explore the human condition and the concept of both individual and collective memory in an intimate and delicate manner. The show presents two series of works: “Entanglements,” hand-woven, finely interlaced photo-sensitive paper tapestries, and the series “Album di famiglia,” polyester emulsions painted in the darkroom through experimental and unpredictable overlays of chemical substances. Both series clearly reflect the artist’s intimate and introspective approach, paying tribute to photography and weaving as daily, constant practices of remembering and transmitting.

The works on display are abstract narratives of emotional states, evocative tales of family memories and reminiscences. The artist imagines family albums, diary pages filled with personal stories and intimate confessions, and even books as containers of memories: “I wanted to speak of the emotional state one feels when looking back at images of the past collected in family albums. It is the memory that emerges from the unconscious. These works speak of a more emotional than visual memory: I imagined them as film rolls, photographic negatives that are ephemeral and faded, much like the edges of certain memories, while some details remain clearly defined as they resurface from the unconscious.” The fluidity of memories, the unpredictability of unconscious recollection, and its facets are represented by the artist in a play of transparency and brightness that shifts with the surrounding environment, in a continuous search for light. Through chiaroscuro, interwoven patterns, and folds in the paper, the light flows fluidly across the works, permeating them with pliable brilliance, altering reflections and shapes. Constantly transforming, the works live and change like an echo of the world’s mutability, of emotions, and of the psyche.

Having always been deeply fascinated by painting, Valentina De’ Mathà’s use of light and her emphasis on its role are inspired by the series of Impressionist paintings in which the same subject was repeatedly depicted as the intensity of sunlight changed throughout the day: “While Monet sought to freeze a moment by painting the effect of light at different times of the day on the same subject, my works have the same goal, the search for light. However, in my case, nothing is fixed; it is the work itself that changes and reacts depending on the light that illuminates it, the surrounding environment, and the viewer who reflects upon it, adding to it and creating a constantly shifting form.” She shares with Impressionism the philosophy of the fleeting moment, wherein everything around us is in constant movement and continuous transformation: light changes with every instant, altering objects in space, shifting in an ever-changing state. It is the idea of mutability, the passage of time through both physical and mnemonic space, of light evolving, and of the fluidity of forms that gradually lose definition to highlight the impression and emotion.

Heavily influenced by the Swiss philosopher and anthropologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), one of the leading figures of psychological and psychoanalytical thought, Valentina De’ Mathà abandons real forms to immerse herself in both individual and collective unconscious memory. As theorized by Jung, there exists within humans a series of emotional memories that emerge from a collective unconscious through symbolic and evocative images. These are archaic and primitive memories and traces passed down from a shared unconscious, which must be interpreted so that individual memory can unfold and reconstruct itself. These traces, although deeply hidden, may emerge in various forms such as dreams, art, or mythology, allowing memory to become a potential access point to ancestral wisdom and, consequently, to the process of individuation.
Thus, individual and collective coexist in Valentina De’ Mathà’s works, which outline a journey exploring memory by intertwining and juxtaposing individual, collective, and unconscious elements through emotional and dreamlike states.

The mediums and techniques used—photography, paper, and weaving—reflect a specific choice by the artist to maintain a strong coherence between the artistic-conceptual poetics and the expressive methods. The works are created in the darkroom through a series of experimental chemical processes deliberately left uncontrollable (as is the unconscious) in order to expand the possibilities of creation and avoid limiting the precision of the mark. This way, the artist does not confine her narrative to a single interpretation but uses unpredictability to speak to the universal. This process echoes the psychoanalysis of the dreamlike: “When we dream, we erase causality, the principle of non-contradiction, space-time, and we annul our Ego” (U. Galimberti).
Having shown a compulsive interest in photography from a young age, Valentina De’ Mathà uses photo-sensitive paper in a paradoxical way: while it is typically used to record and define one’s memories, it also allows for the exploration of the indefinable due to its ability to react unpredictably to chemicals and light. Through this technique, Valentina De’ Mathà uses chance to erase causality, breaking down the obsessive barrier of control inherent in the human mind.

Album di Famiglia is an intimate and emotional story told through tapestries, sculptures, and emulsified papers, where the vast colors and light that permeate them intertwine and alternate in a thoughtful balance of contrasts.

VALENTINA DE’ MATHÀ 
ALBUM DI FAMIGLIA 
curated by Giuliana Montrasio and Beatrice Zanello
Piazza Cioccaro 11, LUGANO – open on appointment (art@allegraravizza.com)

For further information about the artist, please click here.