Aqua Aura. Mirror

When the cover of an art book reports, next to the artist's name, the reference to a time span - for example five years - presupposes that the works contained therein belong to specific years, almost an enclosure within which research is born, grow up, develops and, finally, comes to an end, certainly elastic as well as all the "fixed points" in art, but still fixed within a general path of study and experimentation.

A linear reading that corresponds to the truth also in the case of the book dedicated to the artist Aqua Aura (the works contained in the volume Mirror they are all made by 2013 to the 2017), but which underlies much more, starting from the title, whose lexical ambiguity seems to allude to the work itself, shining like the sublime expanses of the polar glaciers, or even the ancient purification rite called "lustratio", officiated by the censors at the end of the five-year census.

The title of the volume is not intended to pose, then, the emphasis on the period of realization of the works, but on the five years of research that led the artist to the staging of two public exhibitions: Somewhere Out There, edited by Matteo Galbiati, created at Palazzo Cuttica and in the Art Rooms of Alessandria in collaboration with the Arteam Cultural Association, with the support and collaboration of the Municipality of Alessandria and Libera Mente – Laboratory of Ideas (opening event of the II Biennial of Art of Alessandria OMNIA 2017), with the patronage of the Province of Alessandria and the Municipality of Alessandria; Millennial Project, curated by Chiara Serri and created in collaboration with the Municipality of Reggio Emilia / Civic Museums at the Synagogue of Reggio Emilia, with the patronage of the Emilia-Romagna Region, of the Province of Reggio Emilia and the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah (MY) of Ferrara.

From the works for which the artist is known and appreciated (which to simplify we could define as "photographic", although photography in the traditional sense of the term has little or nothing to do with Aqua Aura's work) two exhibitions with interventions are born site-specific, whose dominant trait lies precisely in the openness to the third dimension through the exploration of new languages: video installation, environmental installations and video sculptures. Two autonomous exhibitions that present the germ of a new production, through works – not necessarily definitive – which constitute the beginning of an ongoing story.

[from Preface by Chiara Serri]