Francesca Longhini ‘Baroque Anxiety’

Ibid Gallery is pleased to present Baroque Anxiety, Italian painter Francesca Longhini’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

Francesca Longhini’s artistic practice is seeded in her dynamic and complex investigation into the inaccuracies, decompositions, and reinterpretations of color and poetry. The concept of Baroque Anxiety begins with Longhini’s admiration of Italian masters, in particular, Caravaggio and Titian. However, Longhini saw no future in their visual vocabulary. She not only considers the opulence and richness of baroque as a style, but also imagines it as a state of mind, which is often confused and muddled. In an attempt to create order and spur artistic evolution, Longhini employs control in the form of a reduced palette and steady composition. Wielding this restricted natural palette of chromium oxide green, white, and graphite, Longhini explores an elegant language of stripes, points, and lines on linen and cotton canvas. Within these compositions, small hints of gold, historically considered a holy color and spiritual material, suggest a symbolic light that harkens back and pays homage to the gilded paintings of the Italian Baroque.

The restraint manifested in Longhini’s work also stems from the notion of being in limbo, simultaneously in control but nonetheless refusing to act. It is these moments, which Longhini wishes to situate herself in the work, the space of paralyzing fear, forks in the road, or converging railroad tracks that threaten derailment. These instances when choice and indecision intertwine, where anything is possible because the future has yet to come, where error is not a sign of failure or regression, for Longhini serve as resources for enrichment and potential.

Francesca Longhini was born in 1985 in Brescia, Italy where she currently lives and works. Recent exhibitions include Blunder at Loom Gallery in Milan (2017), Notre avenir est dans l’air at Antiquarium Alda Levi in Milan (2015), Studi Aperti_XI Edizione_Social Utopia at Tornielli Museum in Ameno, Novara, Italy (2015) and The Intruders at Jewish Museum of Venice (2015).

 

Ibid Gallery (press release)