Galleria Ramo is please to present; Ritual Acts, featuring the works by Emiliano artist Matteo Messori and American artist Dave Swensen, with an accompanying text by Lorenzo Madaro.

There is a line that connects life to painting, to drawing, sculpture and to our everyday routine. Lines of rituality, expressed by simple voluntarily gestures, capable of articulating signs and expressing signifiers gathered and reassembled in physical spaces. Observing our own movements through an alienating, yet tangible light, precisely because it is real and therefore authentic. Understanding that it is in the apparent banality of a dilated presents that the flashes of daylight intersect and meet. Allowing us to observe our own movements through an alienating, yet tangible light, precisely because it is real and therefore authentic. Understanding that it is in the apparent banality of a dilated presents that the flashes of daylight intersect and meet. Belonging to the lexicon of every living being: it is expressed with either rigor or disorder, appearing as a space of connection between reality and what is external to it. Built as a place for an emotional retaliation to the explanations of meaning. A ritual that reflects in all of us.

Do dissimilar forms fit together? Do certain reflections only happen in painting and sculpture? or possibly in life? This too is a symptom of the possibility of a rituality of opposites, that when connected are capable of existing in no uncertain terms. There is, within the perimeter of a ritual, something impassable that happens, possibly of inextricable strength. Beyond a gesture, a sign, a body, a real action, there is something inaccessible, which is created. Reaching beyond rituality, creating an arcane gesture. Matteo Messori and Dave Swensen, although coming from dissimilar investigations and interlocutions, meet precisely on this side of the ritual. Through painting and sculpture of the first and through the pictorial work of the second, this exhibition is a possible open inventory of forms, side by side, paradoxes and coexistences (peaceful and otherwise) that speak to us, without falling into the narrative, but remaining anchored to a rigorous and in some ways minimalist keeping, even when it comes to images.

Both artists, in fact, are builders of images and signs that trace possible realities. They build them by drawing on different registers, using painting as a body of constant stratifications towards a possible happening which is to be invented, or at least to be scrutinised as an external viewpoint, an anthropological approach. Resorting to the rite means - Ernesto De Martino taught us this with systematic clarity - to restore man to life, when the ritual is a post mortem weeping. In the two artists we see, however, that there is not a specific drama to be traced epidermically, but deeper research focused around the traces of something more open and fluid. Bodies and faces without identity appear, like ghosts, in Swensen's canvases: placidly absorbed in their affairs, they seem abstract spaces of actually obvious actions. They are absorbed in their perimeters of thought, absorbing and returning light and darkness, while a concentrated painting traces unavoidable chromatic spaces. These bodies of his have no specific gravity, they are aerial, sometimes unnoticeable. They contrast with the contact of a stony surfaces that make up the plastic alphabet of Messori's sculptures. They are totemic, small stones found in the artists studio, which take on the features of forms to be contemplated. The blue marks contacts and joins, gliding over the surfaces and become even more consistent columns. They are his wise elders, presences to turn to in order to find order. They are also the result of a ritual work, which manages to identify an apparent order in the minefield of impracticable forms. They are shapes that wander and float in a space looking for their own apparent equilibrium. They are self-sufficient forms that contrast with the soft volumes of the denim paintings conceived in very recent times. The titles indicate mythological and ancestral references. While in Swensen's two-dimensional works the obsessive layering of soft scraps of paint constitutes presences and absences. But also a cautious ferocity in the soft signs of the features of the bodies and their own dark negations.

Their art curves the geometric order of what surrounds us. The melee between forms and images - and their very negation - constitute a constellation of a possible siege. Their work is a repository of living, real signs, which question us and to which we must answer.