“ ello è il rossore, ma è incommodo qualche volta.”
“ The blush is beautiful, but it is sometimes inconvenient.”
— Carlo Goldoni, La Pamela, 1750

“ Blue suns and grey lagoons
Silver starfish with honeymoons
All these and more to choose
If you”
— Roxy Music, ‘Grey Lagoons’, For Your Pleasure, 1973

It is with great pleasure that Galleria Diciotto and Belmacz present Visible City in San Marco: a juxtaposition of new ‘pages’ by Charlott Weise with Venetian glass momentous curated by Federico Zanini.

Glass, like in its spiritual essence painting, inhabits liquified quality. Both deriving from the fluid state their processes are workable, until layers render them firmly poised, their surfaces an aura of seeming serenity. Through reflections, refractions and obfuscations optical potency is achieved, while the memory of the thought original is contained in each reservoir of motion. Completion is so masterly, the severity and strives so veiled to be akin to the lazzi of the Commedia dell’arte^[1]: gestures rehearsed to the point of seeming spontaneous, movements whose labour dissolve into grace.

Floating freely in space, Charlott Weise’s pages possess a distinctly liquid odyssey.^[2]

Unstretched, suspended canvases, they commence from the ground where Weise saturates the fabric with pigments, dirts, cosmetic powders, and staining agents, adjusting as these soak, pool, and sediment the surface. Layers amass with tidal rhythm, colours bleed and condense, the canvas becoming a site of slow accumulation almost like the lagoon itself. Illumination animates the surface, scenes appearing as moments of arrested flow, frozen movement held in suspension. In a city commanded by water, Weise reflects the material and visual poetics, her pages recalling the translucence of glass, the masters’ deliberacy of palette and the chromatic atmospheres of velatura.^[3]

Visible City demonstrates the enduring sway of the lagoon to dictate distinction, the contemporary intention with the ancient fortuity. For the insight and intimacy with glass developed through Venice’s particular aquatic situation, a destination for those seeking solace from the barbarian invasions dominating the Roman Empire’s final moments. With glassmakers arriving from Rome on one side, and Byzantium and the Middle East the other, knowledge and styles soon entwined to form new. With glass factories often catching fire, the decision was made in 1291 to isolate production to Murano to protect the city, while such containment would also better protect the secrets and methods that had become so prized. Between the 12th and 14th centuries, sustained exchange with the Eastern Mediterranean furthered significant technical and aesthetic developments. Yet glass was not fully recognised as an autonomous art form until the 19th and early 20th centuries, when visionary figures such as Carlo Scarpa, Alfredo Barbini and Napoleone Martinuzzi reimagined its expressive potential, coupling centuries-old artisanal knowledge with modern design sensibilities.

In essence Visible City is liquid inspired by liquid, the origin of all the fluid dwellings of the lagoon.

A publication produced by Belmacz and Damocle Edizioni will accompany the exhibition, with contributions by Ines Weizman and Federico Zanini.

^[1] Lazzo: an improvised interlude of comic dialogue or action in the commedia dell’arte. The term likely derives from le azioni (“actions”). Lazzi functioned as comic interludes—verbal asides, acrobatics, fights and pratfalls—most famously performed by Arlecchino. Their improvisatory brilliance, though often rigorously rehearsed, became a defining resource of commedia actors and later influenced the comedies of Molière and Shakespeare.

^[2] Visible City marks the second presentation of Weise’s Pages series. First shown in Tinted Glass at Kunsthalle Münster in 2021, the Pages investigate feminine iconography, while evoking altered perception through their translucency, the appearance shifting as one moves and observes.

^[3] Gombrich believed the distinction and skill for colorito among Venetian Renaissance masters derived from their dwellings; the blurred outlines and blendings of colours created by the lagoon teaching them to use colour with greater intention and observation than other Italian cities. Meanwhile, the distinct presence of the professional colour-seller accommodating to Venice’s wider array of colour-oriented artisans (glassmakers, maiolica painters, dyers) provided a greater material directory for painters to occupy and experiment with.