To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, 
One clover, and a bee,
And a revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

- Emily Dickinson

This exhibition explores different ways of employing familiar images, that can be experienced as a trigger for new interpretative processes.
The artists resort to different techniques, such as drawing, carving on paper, ceramics, watercolors and common materials, to describe images that recall the world of Nature.
Maddalena Ambrosio (Naples, 1970) highlights the simplicity of an easily recognizable element. By decontextualizing its primary function, she reflects about the disappearance of things, their fluidity and their new identities. Thus, az\ fabric leaves its pre-established structure and spreads into space; a soil blanket covers secrets that the artist traps onto the old knobby surface of a discarded element, and gives birth to new dimensions of the beingness. The viewer is called to observe silent idols, by keeping a memory of the primordial life of the object and, at the same time, by looking to the new values of imagery.
Lightness is the theme behind the work of Leila Mirzakhani (Teheran, 1978). She commits with meticulousness and patience, embedding in her depictions elements full of symbolism, stories and charming references to her Iranian culture. Here the artist presents a mix of two different techniques, connecting video art and paper, where a flock of birds fly towards new places to call home, to a safe harbour where to feel protected from everything. Paper is Mirzakhani’s favourite material, a media that allows her to express spontaneity and fluidity, through a process that looks to the essential without limiting the exaltation of the detail.
Gianluca Quaglia (Milano, 1978) explores the intimate relationship between the various elements that compose a landscape, lingering on the ways of looking at an image, and on the different theoretical meanings at the bottom of the relationship between human beings and Nature. The artist chooses plain papers garnished with flowers and animals, carved and overlapping, or scientific tables. His aim is to take the viewer to feel opposed tensions in order to develop a careful observation. Gardens and birds, derived from the extraction of paper decoration, suggest a transitional dimension. This evolves differently in the ceramic parrots which, standing on pedestals, hide from our sight with a strange lid that makes us want to see what’s underneath.
Balint Zsako (Budapest, 1979) acts like a shaman towards Nature, by realizing drawings that recall propitiatory dances, misterious rites of passage that are sexual duels, change of identites, intrigues driven by trees. His stories leave no room to rationality and order, but rather it’s impulsivity the driving force of things, made visible by the power of color. The ancient magic of dances becomes a meeting of bodies and earthly elements, and let us drift in a world made of shadowy symbols.
The exhibition is thus an invitation to discover the vitality of Nature and to start a journey towards places where skies are always blue and empty of clouds. And, if bees are few, essentiality comes to the rescue, along with purity and seduction. Each artist is able to generate imageries and thoughts that are magnified compared to their starting points. And since bees are few, each of them suggests with her/his work a different and unique proposal where one can find oneself.

IF BEES ARE FEW

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