Cassina Projects is thrilled to present Venus Genetrix, a cross-generational dialogue encompassing works by Claudio Massini (*1955) and Jacopo Pagin (*1988).
For the occasion, a selection of large-scale compositions by Massini alongside recent paintings and blown glass vases by Pagin meet before the quiet, enduring presence of an extraordinary Roman-era statue of Venus Genetrix - conceptual axis and gravitational field of the show.
Claudio Massini’s painterly practice stands as an unicum. His genre-bending approach to surface speaks of texture and quiet monumentality. His visual archeology, a meditative, painstaking accumulation of pigments, incisions and layers. Layers that sediment, murmur, peel, camouflage, reveal. Density and stillness seep through his compositions. Motifs spanning mosaics, domestic interiors, furniture, vessels, architecture and decorative patterns seem to suggest habitats of human presence though possess a physicality of their own. They stand tall, evoking structure rather than adhering to narrative purposes.
Jacopo Pagin approaches painting as an elastic, performative stage where colour, ornament, and gesture slip between registers. Compositions flirt with transformation, images toy with transition as the heterogeneous references which form part of his visual lexicon dissolve into one another debunking any fine line between lived upon and imagined, organic and artificial, visible and invisible. Figures, patterns, bits of clothing and voids appear and withdraw, recede in and out of transparency and conjure up a faint narrative which only grazes the edges of explicit representation.
Ordinary objects as vectors of aesthetic experience and contemplation crop up a fluid choreography across the space. Neither a relic nor a bridge, Venus casts her gravity and provides a potent through-line on the inherent quality of images: constantly oscillating between permanence and flux.
Archetypal generative figure and symbolic mediator of ancestral ethos and aesthetics, the goddess of beauty and mutation embodies at once oneness and multiplicity, eternal and contingent, ideal and sensible, manifesting the duality between the visible and the persisting trace that lingers on. And it’s where that trace, that streak of energy transcends function and the tension unleashes, that the works by Massini and Pagin harmoniously coexist.