Checkmate

Galleria Mimmo Scognamiglio is pleased to present Checkmate, a group exhibition featuring Sara Berman, Rusudan Khizanishvili, Pietro Moretti, Yuxiang Wang and Alexandra Zarins for the first time in the same exhibition space with a selection of recent works.

The title of the exhibition clearly evokes the game of chess, which in the history of images is often confined to concepts of logic and mathematical strategy, but which in this case is used to evoke a definitive turning point, ‘the death of the king’ (checkmate derives from the Persian ‘Shāh Māt’ (تام هاش), which literally means ‘the king is dead’): the fragility of power in the face of inner drives. Checkmate is the move before a definitive change, it is the unexpected magic that anticipates a transformation, it is everything that comes after rationality, logic, mathematics. It is a watershed between a before and an after. In the exhibition the works are in dialogue, they look at each other, indifferent, like knaves and kings, but they are all ready to establish a revolution of intent. Each comes from far away, taking on its own cultural baggage, dissolving without boundaries as happens after the dissolution of a power. The works witness the transformation of the body tinged with magic, a dreamlike leap beyond the rational structure of a knowable evolution.
Here, loneliness, before a premeditated move, leaves room for the unpredictability of the observer-dreamer in glimpsing personal refractions.
Checkmate is the disease that emanates from Pietro Moretti’s works, the exorcisation of a state of change. The melancholy of Sara Berman’s figures suggests solitary meditation before a defi-nitive gesture. Rusudan Khizanishvili’s paintings, on the other hand, bring in a more archetypal component and embody the unexpected freedoms after the end of a restriction. The works of Alexandra Zarins take nudity to a visceral limit, embodying the nonchalance of the unravelling of impositions. Through their pain-tings, the primordial images contained in the collective uncon-scious rise to the surface, bringing together the experiences of the human species and animal life through the symbolic elements of fairy tales, legends and dreams. The works of Yuxiang Wang, a further ‘checkmate’ of the exhibition, then intrude into the exhibi-tion. These play with materials, allowing the propulsive force of an extremely free action to emerge: like that of the laws of physics that act beyond all control.
The complex system of relationships that is triggered in this exhibition  wants to provoke in the observer a question that remains open, but which wants us to experience the intricate network of forces at play within the universe, beyond the structural limits of societies. A mixture that seems to construct an alchemical universe above the narrative consistent with the real world.