Exhibition · Galerie Romero Paprocki · Milano
Shape memory, when applied to materials, refers to their ability to return to an initial state after deformation. This property involves a form of material intelligence: something acts, moves, imprints itself within the matter, and then restores itself. To this technical dimension is articulated a more diffuse memory, linked to the trace: that of the gesture, the impact, and the aftereffect. Much like a mattress or a cushion, which record a body before releasing it, form results from a tension between the individual imprint (its presence in the negative) and this capacity to reenact what has passed through it. The exhibition Memoria di forma unfolds this poetics of the "before" and "after." This dynamic of tension and release, akin to a spring where form remains in a state of potentiality and stands ready to reconfigure itself, runs through the practices and works of Sila Candansayar, Clédia Fourniau, and Nefeli Papadimouli. This shape memory is embedded in the very structure of Sila Candansayar’s sculpture. Her forms, stretched and articulated, seem to hold like bodies in latency, in equilibrium, in tension, on the verge of a tipping point. Polished wood and blown glass retain the trace of the gestures that shaped them: sanding, carrying, adjusting, and balancing. The sculpture does not represent a body; it reenacts its constraints (weight, gravity, resistance) to the point of manifesting a presence. These anthropomorphic forms, without face or narrative, appear as suspended postures, as possible bodies rather than incarnate ones. They evoke a transitory state, as if the form could at any moment readjust itself, shift its center, or find a new balance. For Clédia Fourniau, this notion shifts toward gesture and matter. Her recent works strip away "color-matter" in favor of a frontal "gesture-form": the canvas is no longer a screen reflecting the body of another, but a space of inscription where the artist’s body emerges in relief. Each line measures a physical…