The Umberto Benappi Gallery (Turin) and NP ArtLab (Padua–Milan) present, in the spaces of San Francesco in Ventimiglia Alta, A Sky for Icarus.

The exhibition brings together two artists with very different formal approaches: Leonardo Dalla Torre, a young painter from Venice, and Frédérique Nalbandian, a mid-career French artist who uses two favourite materials in her sculpture and installation work: Marseille soap and plaster.

Inspired by the concept of the “inverted sky” in the thought of Georges Bataille (Billom, 1897 – Paris, 1962), the title of the exhibition evokes ideas of emptiness, fullness, and gravity, which are reflected in the artists’ works. These ideas are summed up in the figure of Icarus, who challenges fate but gives in to the vertigo of his fall. The empty interiors of the church provide the perfect setting for these works, creating a dialogue marked by subtle references.

Along the side altars of the nave, Leonardo Dalla Torre’s panels (Venice, 1995) are not placed to fill the niches, but at their base, as if to emphasise and intensify the empty space above. His works show fragments of bodies and flesh, alternating with faces reminiscent of ancient religious sculptures. The figures seem tired, bent over themselves, deformed: they melt like wax, slip beyond the edges of the panels, and escape the story. The iconography fades, leaving only the echo of what once was. His images bear the marks of time gone by, of an event that has already taken place, whose end can only be imagined.

Frédérique Nalbandian (Menton, France, 1967) works in the space with sculptures in Marseille soap and plaster, unusual materials with strong symbolism, exploring themes such as fragility, care, and resistance to the passing of time. Her installations, in dialogue with the church’s architecture, echo the structures typical of religious buildings, underlining their traditional solidity. A cascade of red plaster roses pours into the nave, bringing a sense of freshness and vitality. Here, the rose – a symbol of beauty, love, and transience – is immersed in plaster, preserving its memory in an “eternal” form.

Through a refined play of references with the surrounding architecture, the works of the two artists offer San Francesco a new interpretation of space. They invite the visitor to a different kind of contemplation, one that goes beyond the religious context to explore the symbolic meaning of architecture. Emptiness and fullness are thus harmonised in a delicate balance, made of silent resonances and precise allusions.

Leonardo Dalla Torre was born in Venice in 1995. Raised in the city’s historic centre, he graduated from the State Art High School of Venice in 2013, then continued his studies at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, earning a degree in Painting in 2017 and in Printmaking–Drawing in 2019.
As a painter, he focuses his research mainly on figuration and portraiture. His models draw both from images in Art History and from the forms of past painting, as well as from a different imaginative world. By removing their contextual differences, he unites the expressive qualities of body and flesh, tracing their signs and openings in a painting that seeks the looming presence of a calamity, suspending the images in a state of perpetual explosion.

Frédérique Nalbandian (Menton, 1967) is a multidisciplinary French artist: a sculptor who also creates drawings, installations, and performances. After taking her first drawing courses at Davis High School in California, she enrolled in 1988 at the École Nationale d’Art Décoratif in Aubusson, and in 1989 was admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art at Villa Arson. In 1994 she was awarded an artist residency focused on drawing at the Ratti Foundation in Como, under the direction of Anish Kapoor and Karel Appel. In 1996 she obtained the Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique (DNSEP).
Her soap sculptures evolve both from within and without, changing over time and sometimes requiring the active participation of the viewer. She also works with humble materials such as plaster, fabric, wool thread, glass, and terracotta. By shaping soap, she creates forms that she either suspends or allows to transform over time, making time itself a key element of her work. Her vocabulary of plastic forms is constantly expanding: rolls, fragments, columns, walls, ropes, but also elements directly related to human anatomy (ears, brains, skins, skulls, hands). In their composition and transformation process, these forms become poetic, charged with a metaphysics of matter that evokes the passage of time, erosion, transformation, and metamorphosis. From the very beginning, her work has been strongly influenced by Le Savon by Francis Ponge, an influence that deepened in 2015 at Cerisy during workshops dedicated to the writer, where she met Pascal Quignard.

IT



ARTISTS 

Leonardo Dalla Torre
Frédérique Nalbandian