Tomas Saraceno, Pinksummer

After successful exhibitions at the Venice Biennale and many leading museums, Francesca Penone and Antonella Berruti, two bold gallery owners in Genoa, bring Tomas Saraceno back to the Pinksummer Gallery.

There is a sense of coming home as you pass by the large sculpture in the courtyard in front of the gallery because this Italo-Argentine artist has been one of its favourite accomplices since the times before it came to the prestigious Palazzo Ducale from the secret and fascinating via Lomellini. It was this desire to meet again that prompted Cloud City, a project (open until 4 December) developed to echo the vaster Airport City, courageously backed by the gallery from the very first. Six years ago, the gallery held the first exhibition triggered by Tomas' fascination – he has always been interested in technological materials, innovation and exchanges between art and science – with aerogel (silica powder).

The gallery owners say that "the first time we met him was for On-Air. Cutting short on ceremony, he bent over and started searching through a bag full of things from which he pulled out a case and asked us to put our hands inside. The substance inside felt very soft and powdery and it left no trace on the skin. Then, Saraceno asked us to put our hands under the tap; the water slid over out skin and created transparent pearls in our palms, strangely precise and hyperkinetic, like balls of mercury when a thermometer falls and breaks. This fine, light material that encapsulated the water was aerogel. Saraceno explained that it was a substance made of silica powder, by no means new and patented by a scientist in 1931. He ended by saying he would construct Airport-City with it (imagining mobile and inhabitable structures). We suddenly thought that Tomas Saraceno was a true architect."

This strong doubt remains this time, too, with his highly refined drawings flanked by a white metamorphic structure in which inside and outside become muddled and the flexible views illustrate bold hypothetical ephemeral constructions and multiple techniques. "Everything is a spider's web – comments Saraceno, perhaps an avid reader of Deligny. It depends how much you can focus on it before starting to get bored. You can find all you want in something small or insignificant", including the chance to invent new potential territories for exploration and to turn a flight of masses into your home. Federico Nicolao

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