MASSIMODECARLO Gallery is pleased to present Red Light Gold Light, a special project of Atelier dell’Errore Big in the Belgioioso Palace from July 5 until July 21, 2021.

“Alarming Red light, blinding gold light. This is how the recent work of Atelier dell’Errore BIG shows itself. A work that arises, as in the past, from the edges of a precipice overlooked by many young people who experience the idea of limit. Atelier dell'Errore leaned on the edge of the precipice and a monstrous multitude emerged from its magmatic bottom. In the span of almost twenty years, they gave it shape, coming to develop a rich and composite language, which includes the sign, but also the word and, more recently, the dramaturgy. From its activity a collection of sprawling animals was born, with terrible names and abnormal dimensions, equipped with jaws, claws and beaks, always ready to attack to protect those who conceived them. An imaginary zoology in which the authors, rather than representing themselves as victims of an existential failure, have chosen to project their anxieties, but also to talk about themselves in their own conscious otherness of unsuitable, intractable, unassimilable creatures: a way to give power to their positions by radically opposing the mere positivity advocated by a society that admits only equal and compliant people.

To this day, those deep black recesses continue to express telluric energy. The organisms that erupt are still formless, and equally indomitable; more metamorphic than ever, more incandescent than ever.

The new creatures of Atelier dell’Errore BIG are in fact animated by the radiant and stainless energy of gold. They are luminous beings that in some cases stand out on the bright red background of the AdE-TEX: a support with an unprecedented texture, specially designed to accommodate them. Among them are dark gods like Castoro (Beaver) and Pollice (Thumb), or hostile, dangerous ones like the great Monopiede (Monopod). But also, Cellule Oracolari (Oracular Cells) proliferate: ectoplasmic nucleus with very high energy, maternal and protective towards the inside, cruel and merciless towards the outside, floating in the void like luminiferous spaceships. There are the Zoo-Prototipi (Zoo-Prototypes), the first forms of a new species, still waiting for a proper name. And the sparkling Totem made of gold leaf. There is a monolith of environmental dimensions whose sealed interior is destined to remain unfathomable.

Less uniquely zoomorphic than in the past, these beings continue to constitute responses to the rejection mechanisms activated by a social system exclusively linked to the logic of conforming and to represent a way of trespassing beyond the problematic dimension of a contingent marked by too many limitations. Paradoxically for Atelier dell’Errore, in this phase, it is through the unalterable and irreducible light of gold that not only the imaginative quality of the sign passes, but the possibility of expressing the black spot from which is impossible to separate.

Each of the works exhibited in Red Light Gold Light arises from the cogency of experience, from an absolute necessity, always personal; and despite being the result of many hands - because Atelier dell’Errore is structured as a real community - it is the expression of singularity without compromises. Finally, each one is based on a stubborn work, in perennial evolution, but always of an inflexible rigor, up to virtuosity: the members of AdE BIG have extraordinary skills acquired over a long time and nourished by the dedication and absolute concentration, which make the laboratory not just an artistic collective, but a life project”. Gabi Scardi

Atelier dell’Errore is a visual arts laboratory designed by the artist Luca Santiago Mora for Child Neuropsychiatry. It began its activity in 2002 at the service of the Reggio Emilia Local Health Authority. In 2013 a new Atelier dell'Errore laboratory opened in Bergamo at the Natural Science Museum in collaboration with the hospital's Child Neuropsychiatry. In 2015, the AdE BIG project was experimented with the children who have come of age, immediately hosted as a work in progress within the Maramotti Collection in Reggio Emilia. In 2018, the AdE BIG artistic collective was established as a social enterprise to professionally devote itself to the visual arts.