Exhibition by Andrea C. Pedrazzini
Curated by Stefano Jacoviello
Realized in collaboration with Casa Bucci
ChigianArtCafé, Palazzo Chigi Saracini
5 July – 15 September 2024

Traces like footprints left on a surface, clues to something waiting to be discovered. Traces that bear witness to the endangered presence of something on the verge of disappearing. Inert remains to be reassembled, to rediscover something that might not be what those fragments originally belonged to: a new creature, probably never existed before, that we couldn’t have known otherwise.
To make sense of them as a whole, traces always require an abduction: a logic that doesn’t work without the intervention of imagination. The assumption of truth gives way to the plausible, which finds its footholds in the imaginary. Thus, from the traces, we are free to construct a world that needs no further proof, other than what presents itself to the gaze capable of recognizing things among things: plants, insects, animals whose reality is legitimate within another world, offered in infinite fragments to be reassembled.
Andrea Carlo Pedrazzini began many years ago to build an inventory of “monstrous” life forms, that is, forms that gain meaning when their traces on paper fall under the gaze that acknowledges their existence and purpose: to redraw a world made of the intertwining of stories that each of these creatures tells based on their shape and composition. In his De Bestiarum Naturis, composed of 999 graphic works, as the artist says, “each beast, each title is a door that opens onto a new room… that is, onto a story or an idea of nature, dialogue, life.” The Bestiary is a project of knowledge whose model is deep-rooted in the distant past of Western culture and is not driven by the desire for exhaustiveness that characterizes the endeavors of the most modern dictionaries and encyclopedias. The Bestiary is not a work concluded in itself but is the framework within which each creature finds its place, always leaving another possible spot.
A selection of graphic works from De Bestiarum Naturis will be displayed in the “Mirabili Tracce” exhibition, tied to the theme of the same name of the Chigiana International Festival & Summer Academy 2024. The exhibition will take place during the Festival, from July to September, in the indoor spaces of the ChigianArtCafè: a porous and transitional space on the ground floor of the Palazzo Chigi Saracini, open to the passage of those whose gaze and listening can steal a small taste of the history and vitality of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana.
Pedrazzini’s visions, drawn by dyeing the paper with ink and overlaying remnants of materials laden with the memory of their previous life, will be traced by impression onto the ceramics produced by Casa Bucci, with processes and forms that refer again to other traces.

Traces are not only remnants of the past but also symptoms of what, unbeknownst to us, is about to unleash. Sometimes they imply a possible return to life Like the sound that from the grooves on vinyl records returns in the time of our lives, every time here and now. Every time the same, but paradoxically every time different, according to the times and circumstances in which it comes back to the world, the sound engraved as a footprint on the vinyl reconfigures in the ears of the listener, meeting other affections, becoming a trace and memory of infinite sentimental experiences.
In the exhibition, the works of Andrea C. Pedrazzini will be placed alongside the records and productions of Gianni Sassi, a brilliant artist, provocateur, intellectual operator, supporter, and stirrer of creativity, whose vision on cultural production has marked the utopias of the latter part of the 20th century. In this way, we will trace the line of an artistic correspondence and an intellectual confrontation between Pedrazzini and Sassi that reflects the connection between the present and a season of experimentation too close to be already history and yet so far away as to run the risk of losing its memory. The traces of Gianni Sassi, who for Pedrazzini was “father, beacon, and client of quality,” will be displayed thanks to the collaboration with Casa Bucci, which will present some elements of its private collection at the exhibition.