The exhibition Fly-by by Erik Saglia opens on June 20 and will remain on view until October 18. Born in Turin in 1989, Saglia has for years developed a research practice that takes the modernist grid as its starting point, adopting it both as a structural reference and as a device to be questioned. In his works, the grid is emphasized, distorted, and reorganized until it becomes a reflective and immersive system, capable of engaging the viewer in a complex perceptual experience. The exhibition title draws inspiration from the language of astronautics and refers to the close flyby that satellites and probes perform at high speed near a planet or celestial body. This is often an initial exploratory approach, capable of gathering essential data and opening up new perspectives of inquiry. In this sense, the exhibition project at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Cavalese unfolds as a traversal of space, understood as a new field of observation and intervention.
For the occasion, the artist will create a series of previously unseen works, produced entirely by hand—from the construction of the frames to the final layering of the painted surfaces. The exhibition path will also be enriched by site-specific interventions conceived for the museum’s spaces, activating its walls as an integral part of the composition.
“The definition of each project has been, as usual, romantic—that is, passionate—guided by the desire to increasingly involve the community and the territory, which remain the beating heart of my vision of the museum as a living and enthusiastic space, a place of exchange and relationship. In hindsight, if I had to choose a few words to convey its essence, I would point to two: connections and opportunity. The Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Cavalese bears witness to these connections, but above all promotes them: they arise among people, stimulated by artists and artworks, and endure well beyond the duration of the exhibition. Leonardo Panizza, Johannes Bosisio, Angelo Dimitri Morandini, Erik Saglia, and Jacopo Dimastrogiovanni—all Italian, because I believe it is essential to value our identity first and foremost through our artists—will they succeed in building new ones? Absolutely yes, I am certain of it. This is precisely the opportunity, understood in the sense suggested by Hans-Georg Gadamer, according to whom ‘the meaning of something is determined in its content by the occasion it is meant to serve, so that within that content there is more than what would be there independently of that occasion,’” states Elsa Barbieri, Director of the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Cavalese.
