“G”- Duo exhibiton by Grazia Toderi and Gilberto Zorio

The exhibition by Grazia Toderi and Gilberto Zorio entitled G, curated by Andrea Viliani,
represents the first collaboration between the two artists.
The exhibition, organized by the Associazione Panchine d’Artista and by the City of
Vigone, with the support of the Piedmont Region and the contribution of Fondazione CRT
– is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue (Italian/English) that will be published during
the exhibition, with an essay by Andrea Viliani.
Belonging to two different generations and following independent strands of research,
Toderi and Zorio have conceived the exhibition in terms of reciprocal references and
correspondences that reposition and reformulate the space-time coordinates of the
exhibition venue, the 17th century Chiesa del Gesù di Vigone, evoking their own time and
space there in which elements both recognisable and indefinite, concrete and imaginary
interpenetrate.
Gilberto Zorio’s Torre Stella (Star Tower) (2021) almost entirely occupies the single nave of
the church: a work that might be seen as either in construction or deconstruction (the
remains of a bygone civilization or the foundations of a civilization to come, a refuge and
shelter that embraces and protects or an observation platform for new discoveries), it

suggests a sensation of both stability and mobility. The five points of the star, on the form-
cum-matrix of which the tower is built out of hundreds of white Gasbeton blocks, create a

theory of rhythmic apertures, passages and loopholes that place in relation its interior and
exterior. One of the arms of the star extends into the central nave, almost as if to compete
with the solidity and authority of the building, incorporating a new perspective that
reorients the building itself with respect to its centrality and orthogonality.

As with the previous versions of Torri Stella – the first dates from 1976 – in this case too
Zorio constructs an architecture of thought in action that rises within a portion of real
architecture: an architecture-archetype that celebrates the capacity of the human being to
comprehend and recreate the world around them, reforming it to satisfy their needs and
visions.
Zorio’s Torre Stella is thus now to be found at Vigone, after having appeared in other cities
over the preceding decades: Brescia, Sydney, Turin, Bergamo, Rome, New York, Bologna,
Florence, Molfetta, Thiers, Pescara, Pesaro, Scandicci, Pollença (where for the first time the
Torre Stella rose in a church, becoming the Stella-Croce, or Star-Cross), Milton Keynes,
Santiago de Compostela, Rivoli…
Quoting from pages dedicated by Germano Celant to this type of work by Zorio, the Torre
Stella corresponds to a “network of vital and energetic exchanges”, to a “system of activation
and revelation of time and of space” as well as of the “liquidity of materials”, defining for
the artist the “habitat of his making”. The Torre Stella therefore permits Zorio to “feel at
home in energy”, as if in an “architectural and symbolic fulcrum” that sets forth a “personal
measure” with respect to the surrounding world. The ideal home for the artist,
anthropological and symbolic architecture of the world accomplished as an energy field.
Grazia Toderi allows the rays of light of her projection to roam the energetic architecture of
Zorio’s Torre Stella, at times reflecting and splitting in the vault of the apse. As has been the
case in other site-specific installations by the artist, Toderi avoids the standard frontality of
video projections in order to define different modes that absorb and reinterpret the
characteristics of the exhibition space. Neither of the works in the exhibition (We Mark,
2020-2021, a continuation and exploration of the I Mark series initiated in 2019) actually
coincide with the partitions and the volumes of the church or indeed with Torre Stella, but
instead seek out and trace their own spatiality and temporality that is capable of bringing
back in almost phantasmal fashion the multiple memorial and iconographic levels of the
church and the Torre Stella.
In the apse, Toderi’s projection shifts slightly to the right, intersecting obliquely with the
central oval now bereft of its original oil on canvas, where the fixedness of a red crosshair
that traverses the space-time of the image transmutes both into a sign of meeting, the
crossing, and a different, possible cross. The oval projection, of large dimensions, also
references that of the cupola above. Turning instead towards the inside of the Torre Stella
located along the nave, the second projection slides obliquely, grazing along the wall
composed by the elongated point of the star, transforming into an indistinct band of light,
colour and energy: indecipherable impression of atmospheric particulates, pyroclastic
smokes or interstellar dusts? The uncertainty remains through to the moment and the point
in which the projection succeeds in penetrating the Torre Stella through a broad aperture,
tracing the variability of the axes of its architectural surface which become the hospitable
screen for newly recognizable images. Intersecting with the projection, the observer also

now becomes an element of the work, in the guise of a “caster of shadows”, as the artist
says.
The image of the two projections on show is composed of a multiplicity of frames that
incessantly overwrite one another to compose a flickering, reddish matter, the same colour
recorded by the space stations that observe our planet, through the effect of the reflection of
the light produced by sodium-vapour lamps illuminating our cities. But also the same
colour as the Cosmic Background Radiation recorded by the Planck telescope. Or the
magma of the Earth and the inside of our bodies. In the church, this colour takes on a further
consistency, the metallic nature of copper, an almost alchemical transformation of the digital
material of the projection in its encounter with the analogical matter of the building.

Scanned and parameterized by a red pointer dot (fixed in one projection, rotating anti-
clockwise in the other), the surfaces of these images, in their constant movement, remain

ambiguous however: they might perhaps represent an urban landscape (a city seen from
above and at night), or a terrestrial planisphere (the translation onto a flat plane of our
spherical planet), or a mapping of the cosmos (with its stars and its galaxies in formation
and in extinction). However, these surfaces might also be just the stratigraphy of a living
and pulsating part of a body, which blends into the scrap of precious mineral matter hidden
in the bowels of the planet.
Whatever they are, Toderi’s projections render the heart of Zorio’s star bright and
expanded, vibrant and incandescent.
A further, dual installation by the two artists (G, 2021) is presented in the sacristy. Toderi
projects a band of light onto a star made of terra cotta, PVA glue and aluminium by Zorio,
revealing the letter “G” that when it encounters the black surface of the star becomes silvery
and suffused with an orange-pink halo: we shall perhaps witness something similar if we
are able to see the birth, or the death, of a real star.
Outside the church, in Piazza Michele Baretta, lastly, is the shape of another star, from the
profile in red concrete of which, set on the surface of the piazza, rise five seats in Luserna
stone, corresponding to the five points of the star, each in turn furrowed by a series of
phosphorescent grooves tracing hypothetical constellations. A projection will appear on the
star seats, but only when the stars appear in the sky, that is, at night. An instant and a
place of fantastic and reflective quiet in which to rest, pause and look from the Earth to the
sky, no longer recognising their difference and their distance, but rather their simultaneity
and a recognition.
Archaic and futuristic, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, tending towards the infinite but
rooted in the soil, in the half shadows and in full light, abstract yet objective, corporeal and
tangible, the works of Toderi and Zorio nurture dialogue both between the two artists and
with the space-time of the observer. In reference to the coexistence of every living being
inherent to ancient naturalistic philosophy or the entanglement principles of quantum
physics, in the interweaving of all the energies that these works emanate, the past flows into

the present, allowing hypotheses of the future to emerge, and the microcosm of the
terrestrial surface, with its creatures of every species, reunites with the macrocosm of the
celestial vault.
The exhibition therefore becomes the imaginary map of a constant search for evolving
senses and dynamic points of view, suspended between geosophy and astrophilia, and
delineates the aesthetic and existential, critical and emotive parallax between the two artists,
Grazia Toderi and Gilberto Zorio: that G that should be understood, rather than as a title
and graphic symbol of the exhibition, as the heart, fulcrum or nucleus of a project on and
with a shared vision.
Then again, love, just like “hate”, a concept and expression of energy used by Zorio in a
number of his works starting in 1969, is nothing but a gesture of concentration and a force
and measure of attraction. And in the end this exhibition, in the intimacy of its nucleus, is
nothing if not an act of love.