Liquid Language

There comes a moment when a word ceases to carry meaning and returns to being pure matter.

Like trees stripped of their crowns, our architectures of meaning have scattered alphabets to the wind, fractured words into the indistinguishable chatter of voices, allowing liquid syllables, emptied of meaning, to fall through the gaps in the world, before sightless windows. In a time saturated with messages, we are witnessing a muted failure to communicate: language collapses, evaporates from the solid surface of discourse, or slips into an insistent background noise.

This exhibition by Gianna Albertin explores the short circuit between word and substance through the primordial grammar of ceramics. Earth and fire, elements that by their nature preserve the memory of a gesture and demand the discipline of heat, become the means through which this gradual silencing is expressed.

Clay no longer receives an inscription in order to preserve it, but to witness its dissolution; dishevelled alphabets pass through the compositions or emerge and assert themselves in relief on shields, like emblems of armies that may one day face one another. In Albertin’s works, even amid explosions of colour and the gleam of glazes, the mnemonic background noise resists assimilation: the sign does not speak.

Form, surface, and texture attempt a dialogue and at times move through the kaleidoscope of colour, carrying the memory of the artist’s still-vivid past as a painter. Many elements are brought into play, driven by the urgency to convey a contemporary message while redefining her own expressive language.