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

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’arte1: 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. 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.

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.

“ 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

Beauty often erupts into life with epiphanic force, at times in a cruel manner. Recognising it may seem simple, but this ease is only apparent. Learning the aesthetics of beauty requires training, since critical judgment is like a muscle that must be strengthened day after day… Emerging from her encounter with Venice, (Charlott’s) work enters a profound symbiosis with the glass of the great twentieth-century masters and the city’s remarkable architecture. She possesses a striking ability to express herself through a fully contemporary language animated by the spirit of the past. For Charlott, painting is an authentic necessity – a practice that is at once creative and intellectual, an urgency from which it is impossible to withdraw. Her research demonstrates that this expressive medium remains vital today: an art form capable, more than any other, of rendering a mysterious energy visible.

— Federico Zanini, Galleria Diciotto

A publication produced by Belmacz and Damocle Edizioni accompanies the exhibition, with contributions by Ines Weizman and Federico Zanini. With kind support from the Mondriaan Fonds.

Artist Biography

Charlott Weise (b. 1991, Görlitz, Germany) lives and works in Amsterdam. Her practice examines the performative construction of femininity and subjectivity across cultural registers ranging from historical figurative painting to literature and mainstream media. Approaching painting as a form of intuitive, image-based writing, Weise composes interior worlds staged through a symbolic mise-en-scène. These pictorial spaces resist linear narration, unfolding instead as poetic and critical structures in which painterly form reflects on identity, desire, and their inherent artifice.

She was a participant at De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2014 – 2016). Prior to this, she studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, under Prof. Christian Macketanz at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, and with artist Heike Dittrich in Bautzen, Germany. Alongside her individual practice, Weise is a member of Cold in Church, a dream pop band and performance collective whose live sets have been presented at institutions including the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam.