19.03.2025 — 23.05.2025

Panneggi brings together a series of unreleased photographs by Chiara Bettazzi, taken between 2022 and 2025, in which fabric takes the central stage.

In Chiara Bettazzi's photographic production, the still life scene is the theatre of a gesture that incessantly composes and decomposes that which resists time and is transformed over time: debris of everyday objects, broken glass, plants, fake flowers, burnt fragments, strips of fabric.
When the fabric becomes the protagonist, the scene empties out, leaving the field to figures and poses, subdued and sublime gaits, sloping planes and depositions reminiscent of the tradition of sacred painting.

It is the drapery as the subtle interface of act and power in the continuous unfolding of the fold, where the interior turns inside out and vice versa. A new compositional tool in the hands of the artist who models virtual figures, animated by a spiritual tension that remains enveloped in the folds.

TABLEAU VIVANT: BETWEEN PAINTING AND SCULPTURE

From being a curtain and backdrop used in installations and sculptural compositions here textile acquires its own autonomy, bringing the artist's investigation of still life closer to the register of the tableau vivant, in a close confrontation between painting and sculpture.

Scivolati o precipitati altrove (panneggi) is material metaphor for a deposition, complementary to the more abstract one of the polyptych. And if certain elements of the still life's object vocabulary return, the point of view has changed, no longer a horizontal plane on which to arrange the objects but a frontal view of the work, now a sculpture in its own right, which no longer reveals anything of its internal construction mechanism.

FOLDING AND UNFOLDING

Carne (panneggi) is the sampling of a fabric both epidermal and synthetic, a visual essay on the functioning of drapery - folding and unfolding, seamless.

The co-presence of organic and inorganic matter, natural and artificial, is an hallmark of the artist's compositions, both in installations, sculpture and photography.