Namsal Siedlecki – SUBLIME
Flip Project is pleased to present SUBLIME, a solo exhibition by Namsal Siedlecki.
The dialogue between Federico Del Vecchio and Namsal Siedlecki stems from a shared history made of hybrid and independent places, of practices sustained by relationships, and of artist-run spaces that have generated meaning, collaboration, and continuity.
The conversation retraces the importance of a moment in which spontaneity fostered lasting communities.
The intervention, conceived as a site-specific project, is the result of the artist’s research and his longstanding interest in the transformative processes of matter, understood as revelatory of both material and immaterial possibilities. Through alchemical gestures, Siedlecki constructs an esoteric and symbolic imaginary, capable of evoking the profound connection between the city of Naples and its genius loci, as well as the cultural and spiritual strata that shape it.
A key work in the exhibition is Paglia, a votive Indian sculpture translated into bronze and inspired by a figure originally made of straw and destined to be released into the waters of a river. The absence of a head is here reinterpreted as a hollow designed to hold a block of sublimating dry ice. The gesture, repeated over time, activates a transformative process intertwining the alchemical and the ephemeral, evoking the imaginative potential of matter in its continuous metamorphosis.
Extracted from the sublimation chamber, the block is placed inside the sculpture’s hollow, recalling the altar stone beneath which a relic is traditionally kept.
Through the process of sublimation, matter shifts from solid to gas, bypassing its liquid state. Here too, the connection with the sacred and with the site hosting the intervention appears as an allusion to the soul leaving the body, an invisible transformation perceived only through its effects.
Campana inhabits the space: a sculpture cast from a loaf of bread, ‘the body of Christ’ that, through sound, traverses forms and architectures just as digestion travels through the human body in its transformative journey. The work activates both a physical and symbolic resonance, returning to the space an energy that propagates as vibration.
We find ourselves in France, in the underground of Saint-Nectaire, where thermal waters travel for decades through volcanic fractures, depositing calcite along their path. This natural, continuous process becomes for the artist a living archive of transformation.
Deposizione may initially appear as a monochrome, yet the long production process reveals a complex stratification on raw canvas, turning the work into a metaphorical journey through time. Its surface carries memory.
The canvas belongs to a series placed beneath a waterfall for approximately six months and rotated daily to encourage an even sedimentation of crystals. If stalactites require millennia to form, the waters of Saint-Nectaire uniquely accelerate this process.
Disegni, the liquid collected in the space’s holy-water font, is obtained by distilling through an alembic several drawings made as part of a performative process. The result is a transfiguration of the mark into matter, a passage from graphic gesture to distilled substance, as though the drawing were reduced to its essence.
The project contributes to the appreciation of atypical sites and to the redefinition of the role of art within the urban fabric of Naples, reaffirming its cultural and transformative vocation.
Throughout the exhibition period, a series of parallel activities and public initiatives will further enrich the project, fostering moments of encounter and participation.