Hic Sunt Dracones. Chiara Camoni ~ Atelier dell’Errore

curated by di Elena Volpato

Hic sunt Dracones consists of two intertwined paths: that of Chiara Camoni and that of the collective Atelier dell’Errore. It is a story in which the two very different artistic histories confront and respond to each other. Following the previous exhibition curated by Elena Volpato, Sul principio di contraddizione (On the principle of contradiction), this exhibition acknowledges the presence of metamorphic thought in contemporary art or, at least, in its most fertile territories, those straddling its extreme border, where cartographers would once have written their caveats and drawn dragons of every species and shape.

“Metamorphic thought,” writes Volpato, “is a different and sister variant of the thought of contradiction. In literature, it is the thought that arrives from outside, like a breath of inspiration. It arrives writhing and obsessive as the oracular thought of Pythia. It modifies the nature of he who receives it and gives him the ability to read every aspect of reality symbolically, seeing through the watermark, as it were; to look at every form in its continuous possibility of transformation and analogy with other forms. It means being able to look at something, recognise it, and at the same time see in it also what it apparently is not.

It is a thought that generates dragons: hybrid and polymorphous beings for which the medieval tradition contemplated the blending of every possible anatomical trait. Similarly, it inspires works that eschew any classification, that go beyond any grid, that hold together multiple images, multiple times, multiple moments.

Both Camoni and AdE often work in a germinative manner, handing us works in which it is still possible to read the development of growth in a progressive addition of elements from which the whole is born: detail after detail. But they also show us a gradual modification of forms, from work to work, in a diachronic metamorphosis of the work that retains within itself the ambiguity and magic of the cyclic matrix in which every progression is also a return.

AdE and Camoni frequent otherness. The Atelier dell’Errore does so by constitution, gathering under the direction of Luca Santiago Mora the mastery of young artists with atypical neurological traits, with a natural predisposition to the wandering thoughts of what the ancients called madness: the principal form of metamorphic thought. Chiara Camoni, on the other hand, is in natural connection with principles other than those of our cultural orthodoxies: she is linked to the matrices of the before. She knows how to turn the world to the feminine and in doing so she brings to light erased origins, our foundations: she leaves out Apollo in favour of the serpent nymphs who prophesied at Delphi before him. She lays aside the tradition of the ancient masters to recall even more ancient creative gestures, inscribed in our origins, as well as in nature.

Chiara Camoni often works collectively with her collaborators at the Experimentation Centre and with artist friends, and Atelier dell’Errore cannot but work in this way. This, too, means cultivating metamorphosis and contradictory hybridisation: welcoming the gaze of others, putting several heads together in the intimate circle of creative thought are perhaps the last frontier on the road to discovering oneself other than oneself. There dragons be.”