On Tuesday, January 28, 2025, at 6:00 pm, Quartz Studio is pleased to present The Yellow House, a project by Francesco Barocco (Susa, Turin, 1972) conceived specifically for the space.

Francesco Barocco's yellow house in Turin is a conceptual response to Vincent van Gogh's yellow house in Arles. For his solo show at Quartz Studio, Barocco has created a new body of work in which sculpture and text reflect one another in an osmotic formal dialectic, marking the start of a new artistic line of inquiry. Barocco feels a profound spiritual and poetic connection to Vincent Van Gogh. He has sought to conceptually erase the visual imagery immediately evoked by the artist's name, appropriately only the titles of his works (often simple descriptions of the images he painted), with which Barocco has conceived semantically dense and highly sophisticated quatrains.

Each poetic text is juxtaposed with a two-dimensional concrete sculpture that visually suggests the profile of a saint. Only the detail of the beard is in relief, leaving the rest of the facial features in a kind of unfinished state (the artist's alter ego). With these works, Barocco establishes a deep bond between himself and Van Gogh, a close-up dialogue with him that whispers to those who approach his works words and thoughts that generate new images, never worn out by the passing of the years.

His subtle operation creates a conceptual shift, selecting titles and recomposing them to give them another meaning. Formal precision and semantic density are the visual and expressive tools that Barocco has adopted here to create a new cycle of works with a powerful, intimate sense. Quartz's space is brought back to the spareness of its familiar cement tile floor and its lived-in walls, which become part of the mise en scène that Barocco conceived for the exhibition, in which all the essential elements of his poetics can be discerned.

Francesco Barocco (Susa, Turin, 1972) is a visual artist whose inquiry into signs and sculpture grows out of the discipline of engraving, which he takes as a forebear to sculpture. His pieces are often conceived in the form of a “fragment,” reflecting his attentive observation of the world which he subjects to a meticulous, formal synthesis. His work's defining qualities are spareness and the poetic xxx of the subjects he represents, which he reworks starting from a select figurative repertoire, rendering him an interpreter of contemporary classical thought.

Francesco Barocco has taken part in many group exhibitions in international museums and galleries, including: Galleria Civica, Trento (2023) KAI 10 Arthena Foundation, Dusseldorf (2022); GAM – Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin (2021, 2015 and 2009); Museum of Modern Art, Vienna (2018); Museo d'arte della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano (2018 and 2006); Venice Biennale, Italian Pavilion (2015); Ludwig Forum, Aachen (2015); Kunsthalle, Berlin (2012); Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2011); Magasin, Grenoble (2010). His works are in public collections, including GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin; Museo Ettore Fico, Turin; Museo d'arte della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano; KAI 10 Arthena Foundation, Dusseldorf; Gaby and Wilhelm Schürmann Collection, Herzogenrath. A selection of his solo exhibitions includes: Galerie Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin (2023); Norma Mangione Gallery, Turin (2022, 2018, 2014, 2011 and 2009); Nicolas Krupp, Basel (2017); Fondazione Ermanno Casoli, Fabriano (2011); Laura Bartlett Gallery, London (2010); MAR, Ravenna (2008). He is represented by Galerie Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin and Nicolas Krupp, Basel.