Il punto focale

Tucci Russo Gallery is delighted to announce the representation of Linda Carrara and invites you to her solo exhibition Il punto focale (‘The Focal Point’) at its Turin venue, Tucci Russo Chambres d’Art.

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“Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker Schatten”
(Where there is much light, the shadows are deep)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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I looked at the gallery floor plan for weeks. I studied it. One day I noticed that it indicated north; so I oriented it towards that cardinal point and tried to align myself with the spaces that would host the exhibition. I thought about the other cardinal points, about a window facing south-west, the warmest point. I saw the earth, with its inclination, rotating around the sun and giving life to the seasons and shadows. I imagined the visitor, once back in their daily life, orienting themselves towards the same point.

Linda Carrara contemplates the universe and reflects on (her) focal point: the sun. Around the sun, there is black. It can be found in frescoes, where it animates the stormy skies of Lotto and Masaccio’s works, sometimes with veils of azurite. Vine Black, Mars Black, Mineral Black, Perylene Black, Atrament Black, Lamp Black, Bone Black, Schevenings Zwart, Noir de Pêche, Terra Negra Italo Romana, Cold Black, Slate Black are her blacks, found and collected over the years. In Linda’s studio, in Villa d’Adda or in Milan, there are colour and shade tests with the names of the blacks used, to remember the differences. These are pigments that come from the earth, fire and oxidising air, or – in the case of those invented in modern times – they are the product of chemical reactions. But they are all Blacks. The ‘non-colour’ around the sun has a life of its own. And the earth, like the sky in the frescoes, takes on a new meaning. The star in the centre points the way. Spring, summer and the changing seasons transform the earth and our relationship with it. Even frottages change with the seasons. Linda steals the forms of the earth and nature, and leads us into matter, into the essence of things, where macro and micro resemble each other and proportions are no longer an index of reality. I cieli (‘The skies’), which take their name only from the black of which they are made and which immerse us in a fiction that at first glance seems real; le reti (‘The nets’), which create the beyond towards which to look; and, finally, Il sole (‘The sun’), which enters through windows without our noticing how fast it ‘moves’.

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For years, she has devoted her work to painting, seeking the meaning of her work in the material rather than in the image depicted. The subject is painting and its evolution, in a technical exploration that seeks to evoke the visual and sensory logic of nature rather than directly represent the visual image we perceive. The use of paint is free, focused on the changing events. In her frottages, for example, Linda Carrara seeks to capture the form of the landscape directly from the landscape itself, tracing its forms by contact. The negative of reality imprinted on the canvas that for a moment was the skin of reality. The intention is clear, but the final event is not. This is true of many of the artist’s other works too, in which painting is taken to extremes and left free to take on the forms that occur. In this sense, the images presented by Carrara do not coincide with the things they describe, and the painting’s material becomes a field of research into the essence of events.

Linda Carrara graduated in 2007 from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts with the artist Vincenzo Ferrari and then collaborated with him as a studio assistant until 2012. In 2014, she completed a Master’s degree at the Kask School Academy in Ghent, doing an internship at Michaël Borremans’ studio. Among her major solo and group exhibitions are: Kunstmuseum Reutlingen KONKRET, Reutlingen, Germany (2025-2026); Triennale Milano, Italy (2023); Cremona Art Week, Italy (2023); Villa Presti, Ospitaletto (Brescia), Italy (2023); Fondazione ICA Milan, Italy (2022); Centrul de Interes, Cluj-Napoca, Romania (2022); Museo Floris-Romer, Hungary (2021); The Open Box, Milan, Italy (2021); Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Brussels, Belgium (2018); FABRIKA Moscow, Russia (2017); Blanco Space, Ghent, Belgium (2017); Fondazione Rivoli2, Milan, Italy (2014). She won Il Talento Generoso award in 2024 and the Terna Prize in the Painting section in 2014. She has participated in several artist residencies, including MOMENTUM Berlin (2015), LKV Trondheim Norway (2016), NCCA in Saint Petersburg (2019) and Palazzo Monti in Brescia (2020).