Francesco De Prezzo’s practice focuses on spatial displacement, moving between fullness and emptiness, shifting attention through tensions of presence and absence.

“Liminal Figures” is a non-exhibition. Following Robert Barry’s classic work, “during the exhibition the gallery will be closed”, De Prezzo empties the space and aims to investigate the potential of photographic documentation in the global art system, where the installation view plays a pivotal role.

Seeking to subvert this vision, he splits the artworks from the context, revealing a fragmented vision of the exhibition, no longer a totalizing view flattened into a final photo, but rather, a separation between paintings and walls.

At first glance, we are captured by the polished appearance of FORM’s white cube spaces, but then left unsettled by the missing pieces within them. Something feels wrong. We cannot detect the familiar presence of paintings, sculptures or installations that usually occupy such a space. And that sense of absence is the work itself, a disruption of the familiar, the visible withdrawn. The actual paintings, in this case, might finally be seen in their uniqueness, somewhere behind the scenes.

De Prezzo tries to highlight the step before the final product, the beginning of everything, the embryo before birth. He exhibits artworks as they appear on shipment or sales checklists, much like those displayed in some gallery offices, and he views the space as the architecture and the walls themselves, before the connotation of exhibition spaces, detached from the idea of the final product: a deconstructivism of documentation, a return to the basics of the exhibition itself.

If you are now trying to understand what remains to us, the viewers, in this deconstructed scenario, the answer is simple: just connect the dots! According to the “moiré” concept, De Prezzo divides the entirety of the installation view into two basic patterns, space and artwork. The ultimate goal is to place the spectator in a creative state, using the two given patterns to imagine the third: the exhibition.

— Matteo Giovanelli