Between sound and silence, the art of Manuela Scannavini

There is, in Spazio Sferocromia, that special stillness that only artists' environments know how to preserve: the walls of Umberto Ippoliti's studio have kept a stratified memory over the years, which they now discreetly restore to Manuela Scannavini's works. Quando il suono si fa segno is her first solo exhibition, and the maturity with which an artist at her debut presents herself to the public with a project of such completeness is striking.

The starting point is the dialogue with Maestro Carmelo Travia's compositions, in particular Silver Smoke and Zirconium. We are not, it must be said immediately, in the parts of mannerist synaesthesia: Scannavini does not illustrate sound, he receives its impact and returns it in sign. His abstract canvases, removed from any figurative foothold, proceed by means of chromatic pulsations rather than descriptions; colour inhabits them as a vital function, and a sort of internal wave binds the works together, so much so that the exhibition ends up looking less like a sequence of paintings and more like a single meditative installation.

Curator Eugenia Querci, speaking of a 'faithful portrait of a journey', actually captures the most intimate sense of this collection. The three large central canvases are its fulcrum: surfaces dominated by white, traversed by almost surgically cut blacks, in which a continuous slippage between what emerges and what is hidden can be felt. Consolation is not sought here, nor is pain posed: rather, the suspension of one who waits for something that does not arrive, and in waiting becomes attentive. An oscillation, rather than a drama.

Scannavini's merit also lies in not having relied on a single language. The exhibition is a small organism with three voices - painting, music, words - and the hybridisation, which in other cases ends up dispersing the discourse, here concentrates it. Evidence of this is the video with the young gymnast Sofia Biancari, where the discipline's ribbon enters into dialogue with the pictorial gesture in a choreography by Giulia Rosolin, or the eight-minute video-narrative, to be listened to through headphones, in which Francesca Ritrovato's voice lends the features to an autobiography that is not her own: a short-circuit of reciprocal borrowings that brings to mind certain more visceral pages by Giulio Marzaioli.

Between the materiality of the first works - resins, lotus leaves, surfaces that ask to be touched - and the fine grain of the last papers, a whole path is measured, from body to breath. When the sound becomes a sign, it does not promise revelations, and precisely for this reason, to those who know how to stop, it ends up delivering some.