Elena Volpato, conservator and curator of the GAM in Turin, will talk about the relationship between writing and visual works, tracing some of the stages in the history of Western art where the co-presence of the visual and the verbal has constituted one of the oldest forms of questioning on the nature of the image and art, starting from that inextricable knot of meanings and ambiguities that arise from the author’s signature on its surface. From that signature with which, for centuries, the image has been corroborated and at the same time contradicted, bringing it back to its being surface and colour in the very act of sanctioning its accomplished reality, we will come to consider some contemporary visual works, consisting solely of verbal elements.

The meeting is part of the Incontri illuminanti con l’Arte contemporanea 2022-23 project, the public programme that accompanies the Luci d’Artista public art exhibition.