Francesca Polizzi
Lunaria
Lunaria, a solo exhibition by Francesca Polizzi (Palermo, 1988). Accompanied by a text by Daniele Franzella - the exhibition marks a pivotal milestone in the artist’s research, presenting a body of previously unseen works that investigate the concept of the "natural ruin" and the process of subtraction as a generative principle of form.
The project originates from a reflection on the Lunaria annua, a plant whose final configuration appears as the result of a process of subtraction. When the fruit dries, the seed falls, and the matter is emptied, what remains is a thin membrane - a transparent disc that holds only the trace of its own existence.
Through references to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and the aesthetic reflections of Georg Simmel, the exhibition explores the ruin not as mere dissolution but as an active form. While for Simmel the ruin represents the reabsorption of human labor by nature, in Polizzi’s vision, nature itself produces its own ruin, surrendering to a dimension of pure, lyrical appearance at the moment biological life seems to withdraw.
Francesca Polizzi’s research is distinguished by an archaeological approach to natural materials - raw wool, wax, rosin, and brambles - transformed through rigorous stages of manipulation.
A series of raw wool felts, printed with images of architecture and natural caves, are subsequently treated with the encaustic painting technique. This process effects a layered concealment of the image, reducing its documentary value to return it as an opaque vision - a partially re-emerged mnemonic trace.
In a new series of ceramics, raw wool is kneaded directly into the raw clay. During the firing process, the organic component burns away and disappears, leaving cavities and imprints in the ceramic body. These voids evoke fragments of vanished civilizations - portions of walls, exedrae, and broken arches - where the dialogue between matter and absence becomes tangible.
The works on display thus stand as relics of a profound sensory dimension, the results of a transformation in which the fragment and the casing become acts of presence and permanence.
