Foot drop

Foot drop is a solo exhibition by Marco-Augusto Basso (1995), a project that brings together a series of sculptures conceived as an investigation into the physical, symbolic, and emotional relationships that exist between heterogeneous objects and situations. In this new production, the artist investigates the possible material behavior of things—their ability to evoke, resist, collide, support, and contradict each other—exploiting formal tension to hypothesize their dynamics and relationships.

The title of the exhibition is deliberately ambiguous: it refers both to the progressive ballistic fall of projectiles and to a neurological condition that partially compromises walking, sometimes affecting the use of the foot.

In foot drop, using pairs of objects, Basso creates what he defines as associative shorthand – an immediate, instinctive, at times grotesque visual writing capable of colliding non-linear directions of meaning. Where a dolphin inflates to fly into the sky, an orthopedic brace arrives to ‘contract to correct a brother’, then again, organ pipes held together by a black leather whip, some amplifying devices echo silently to a strobe light; in this sense, the exhibition space is to be understood as a layered set of relationships between objects, rather than as a mere place where a few stand-alone works are exhibited.

The works on display ambiguously allude to brief visual mottos, proverbs, or warnings derived from particular combinations of elements: the interpretation of these accrochages is entrusted to their own surface and formality, in the total absence of interpretative supports and titles. The exhibition aims to be a landscape of suspended tensions in which the artist highlights the ambiguity of matter to convey the fragile, ironic, physical complexity of the nature of objects.