Luca Pancrazzi: Big Bang Gang Bang

TOTAH presents Big Bang Gang Bang, an exhibition of new works by Milan-based artist Luca Pancrazzi. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and in New York. 

A key player in Alighiero Boetti’s studio, the multimedia artistry of Luca Pancrazzi is known for expressing an almost monochromatic stillness. Inspired by his recent visit to New York City and upstate New York, Big Bang Gang Bang is something like a visionary travelogue, reveling in the creation of pixelated effects and contorting the perception of both natural and manmade forms. 

Pancrazzi allows chance operations to alter the way an object is perceived. The slopes of a mountain or a hill, for example, can become formalized, almost abstract, while losing nothing of the sinuous definition which makes them objects of nature. In a similar vein, the lattice-like grating superimposed on his depictions of city streets are overgrowths that occlude the sensation of time, the stillness of space. 

Phenomena like starbursts, fences, or a nexus of tree limbs permeate Pancrazzi’s oeuvre. These themes can incorporate materials as ephemeral as dust, whose gravitational tracings compose the 39 drawings of Big Bang Gang Bang, preserved by India ink breathed onto paper. Even the weather itself, an exponent of the organic flow of time, becomes registered as an aleatory wash in the graphite on canvas work, Kursk, a painting deliberately left out in the open air. Poeticizing the mediation that fills both natural and man-made settings, the works on exhibit embody the sensation of time passing, capturing a graduated process of growth or decay within the fixity of a unitary image. 

The tone of Big Bang Gang Bang is one of contemplative surrender to the circumstances of perception, where incidental perspectives are intrinsic the to visibility of a work. Pancrazzi renders the invisible visible using only formalist techniques, rendering the unknown known while still preserving its character as a qualitas occulta.

Luca Pancrazzi (b. 1961, Florence) works in painting, drawing, photography, installation, and sculpture, as well as other media. He has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1997), the Triennale di New Delhi (1997), the Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion (1998), the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007), and the Rome Quadrennial (2008). Some of the public spaces that have hosted his work include PS1 Contemporary Art Center (1999), Galerie Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau (2001), Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts (2007), Pomodoro Foundation (2010), and the Siena Children’s Museum (2010). He lives and works between Milan and Filandia.

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