SIGNS OF TIMES
APALAZZO GALLERY . BRESCIA . ITALY
2021

Curator : Jérôme Sans

Recent events that plunged the world into a state of global uncertainty have proven that there is definitely no such thing as a universal truth. Our societal model, which seemed to be unanimously accepted, turns out to be a fragile chessboard that can be shaken at any moment. If, after the pandemic crisis, the world appears to have returned to its usual course and former appearance, the core of everyone’s thinking has inevitably changed; signs have shifted too. It is no longer the individual who constructs his or her environment but the environment that defines us as human beings.

© Melania Dalle Grave . DSL Studio © Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa

The exhibition Signs of The Times intends to put into perspective the territory of these plural questionings. How to decipher and appropriate from now on the new signs emitted by our environment under this uncertain horizon? As the collision between our civilization and the limits imposed by nature becomes more and more visible, how can we reconcile the lightness of the simple pleasures of the present moment with the global consciousness of our time?

By demonstrating critical thinking, the artists gathered in this exhibition address these existential, political, societal questions that drive our experience of the world today with radical imagination. Under the sign of the mirage but also of the semantics and the power of reproduction to infinity, the exhibition proposes multiple universes flirting in a relaxed way with the anguish of an uncertain future. Beyond their immediate expressive power, the works tackle in an underlying way some of our most pressing current issues: global warming, the rewriting of history, the challenges of the younger generation in the face of a consumerist society, the injunction to produce value, the flood of information messages, and unbridled individualism… If it is not a question here of giving solutions or answers to these problems, the works approach in a frontal way this mutation of signs currently taking place. And, in our world of images, they are, in fact, an acting force.