Press Release

Italian painter Enrico Minguzzi was introduced to the Czech audience for the first time this year as part of the group exhibition Preparing for Darkness, Vol. 8 at the Museum Kampa in Prague.

Enrico Minguzzi (*1981, Cotignola) is an Italian painter born in Cotignola, who currently lives and works in Bagnacavallo. He constructs his subjects as if in a process of phenomenological description that he subsequently alters and decomposes in order to achieve greater formal mobility. As in his paintings, he created this works as a result of a stratification of colours and figures. Through a patient superimpositions of veils, Minguzzi composes imageries that are subjected to a continuous process of mutation and metamorphosis, until he achieves a dynamic equilibrium that nullifies any pretense of distinction between figuration and abstraction.

The title of the exhibition references Isaura, one of the imagined cities from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Lucia Rossi, the curator of the exhibition, said: “Like Calvino, Minguzzi seems to ask: What are those primal truths that are cast as the basis of life but also of the progress of individual civilizations? His works, with living beings, among the sleepy and the inanimate, manifest their beauty and greatness by laying their foundations on top of an underground, deep reality, of which the inhabitants know nothing. Veritas est in puteo (truth lies in the deep), as Schopenhauer states. The true essence is precluded, and these landscapes, still lifes, and thin organisms base their magnificence on a basic ignorance. What Minguzzi does is to push/pull us to the bottom of the black lake, to shed some light and offer more fullness.”

Through careful manipulation of color, texture, and form, Minguzzi invites viewers to dive into this submerged reality. His “detours of nature” reveal worlds poised between harmony and chaos, order and disorder, where every element has its own resonance, giving birth to new beings and interpretations. The exhibition embodies the essence of a hybrid atmosphere – one where the natural and artificial, the real and imaginary coexist.

Minguzzi’s works embody a fundamental crisis of place and nature, one that resonates with the crisis of modernity itself. His invisible ‘cities’, like Isaura, may be unreachable in the physical world, but they exist in the viewer’s mind – pulviscular utopias, fragments of a larger, unseen whole. As Kublai Khan, the emperor in Calvino’s novel, ponders the truth of Marco Polo’s stories, we, too, are drawn into Minguzzi’s world, uncertain yet compelled by its deeper truths.

JSP Art Gallery invites you to the exhibition Isaura by Italian artist Enrico Minguzzi, opening on December 18, 2024. This exhibition showcases new works that delve into the unseen and the buried, exploring landscapes both mental and lived through intricate painting that merges reality with the imaginary

Exhibition Title: Isaura
Exhibiting Artist: Enrico Minguzzi
Exhibition Curator: Lucia Rossi
Duration: December 18, 2024 – January 30, 2025 Opening: December 18 at 6:00 PM
Address: Lázeňská 287/4, Prague 1 – Malá Strana