Measuring Ghosts
Background
Earlier this year I met painter Marco Frezza, through our mutual friend Matthew Wood. Both artists occupy a studio space in the abandoned Marks and Spencers in Warrington town centre, and it was in this context that I first saw Marco's work, propped up against the wall of a desolate shopfloor.
We got on instantly. Both of us share a deep drive for quality, but also a lack of preciousness in our respective practices. Not too long after first meeting, Marco asked if I'd be interesting in curating a solo show of his, this is what would become Measuring Ghosts.
Measuring Ghosts was the first time I'd been asked to curate a show, and I owe a lot to Marco in being so trusting. The process felt very natural, picking out paintings, laying them across a mock gallery drawn out with tape on the floor. The work itself is incredibly space-dependent, reactive to blankness, absence, and so it was my first experience of curation as an architectural exercise.
Working on this exhibition with Marco, and being asked to provide my own responses to his work (below), revealed much more about space, architecture and material than I had anticipated. These are themes I am constantly mulling over in my head, so its been rewarding to see them realised in physical space.
All in all, an extremely fulfilling project and I'm excited to do it again.
Response to the Work
To my mind, Measuring Ghosts is about dialogue. It’s easy to read the ordered against disorder, sterility against decay, but what really makes Frezza’s work is the omission, the implication, the censorship of space. Paintings which were at one time gargantuan are spliced across walls, interrupted by wall space and frames. They react to one another across the gallery space. Who’s to say where the painting ends and the gallery space begins?This speaks to another key characteristic of Frezza’s work. That in spite of its abstraction, because of it, Measuring Ghosts is rooted in material reality. Whilst the paintings themselves are reminiscent of battered walls and rusting metal, the framing of the work necessarily involves the viewer and surrounding architecture. Have levels been superimposed, or voided? Frezza’s work demands assessment of the physical, of the interplay between clean and dirty, an interrogation of the aesthetic merits of each, and all within the three-dimensional space we call home.
