Strade Comode ed Evidenti

Amanita presents Strade Comode ed Evidenti, a solo exhibition by Italian artist Arianna Tosi showing large-scale paintings. Arianna Tosi (1994) was born in Omegna, Italy. She has a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Academy of Brera in Milan. Strade Comode ed Evidenti is her first career solo exhibition.

—

With an effective use of layering and negative spaces, Tosi manages to convey an overarching sense of etherealness. Combining sci-fi imagery with nebulous and disorientating vamps of paint, these works become anachronistic, teetering between digital and abstract. The paintings are purposefully exempt from narrative and entice us to exalt our own imagination into choreographing themes within the subject matter. This provocation, and the arbitrary selection of figures, are paradoxically the focal point of her practice. Figures – as mundane or as silly as they may be – instantly assume a higher plane of existence as they appear on canvas; in her words, “even a shopping list can assume authority.”

Titles in the exhibition are the sole hints to the dynamics at play within the work - Curve e Controcurve (Curves and Countercurves) features a heroine riding a male-figured airplane escaping the clutches of a wandering crocodile. In Prossimità della Fine Deviare (In the Proximity of the End, Deviate) a desperate horse attempts to escape a tiger’s attack, and analogously, a woman fends off an assailant. These parallelisms in subject matter and title reveal some of the works' intrigue in their otherwise ambiguous nature.