'A LULLABY' by Riccardo Bellelli and Luca Campestri at GALLLERIAPIU, Bologna

Suspended in time and space between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the works on display are bound together by a shared resistance to being defined. They take us to the threshold between staying and escaping from the condition of nostalgia, desolation, and de-mondification with which we must come to terms. A LULLABY is a liminal atmosphere, a state of drowsiness lulled by a distant sound that simultaneously encourages tenderness and disorientation. An emotional landscape on the edge between day and night unfolds on stage, where the images taken by Luca Campestri's phototraps and Riccardo Bellelli's "strange" encounters of objects, hybrids between the fantastic and the mainstream, activate our memory center giving us a sense of deja-vu, of intimate bewilderment.

A poetics of the remnant can be encountered in both artists: the things that remain from the warmth of a childhood memory and are saved from the erosion of the memory. Riccardo Bellelli's creatures are the result of material disintegration, scraps from the desertification of reality. They are ironic 'ready-made', unloved objects that seem to have spontaneously aggregated, refusing to deteriorate and disappear. Luca Campestri’s photographic works, on the other hand, arise from interpolation. The night vision and the spectrogram alter the image causing a semantic loss, like time slowly fading our memories. Windows on the intimacy of the animal world, the images become ghosts, sub-presences, on the threshold between things that are not yet but whose effects precede their enactment.  

The remnants of Riccardo Bellelli and Luca Campestri inhabit an ambivalent dream world, lulled in a persistent ambiguity. They are a soft shimmering dreamscape, and at the same time glimpses of a false awakening from which it is not possible to break out.

In order to tell whether or not we are inside this dream dimension suggested by the artists, you need to gather as many clues as possible. First of all, you must pay attention to the sharpness of the contours of objects, faces, or better yet, your own hands. Thus, the exhibition is completed with a pair of gloves, a work that when activated by the gallery staff challenges the audience to a mental game, which will allow them to figure out which side of the threshold they are on.