An exhibition that looks like a large stage contraption created out of images downloaded from global databases. An endless array of representations of Nature that reflects on Nature itself. Curated by Paola Nicolin. Opening extended until March 19, 2023.

What is Nature? What do we really know about Nature? What do we see when we look at Nature? Who and what makes us want to have images of Nature? Come un limone lunare (Like a lunar lemon), an exhibition of Francesco Simeti’s work (Palermo, 1968), attempts to answer these and many other questions. Running from 23^rd September 2022-19^th March 2023, it officially opens the art programme being hosted by XNL Piacenza (the Piacenza and Vigevano Foundation’s Centre for Contemporary Art, Film, Theatre and Music) under the Art Direction of Paola Nicolin.

Alongside a heterogeneous selection of works – collages, wallpapers, sculptures, ceramic objects, installations and public works resulting from over twenty years of reflecting on the nature of images – Simeti is also displaying a new work in Piacenza specially designed for XNL’s contemporary art galleries: an eye-catching, welcoming, immersive machine – created by collecting images from digital databases for the sale of photographic content – that allows the public to reflect on Nature and on what drives people to acquire images of it. The artist creates a set, a deliberately rudimentary contraption projecting glossy images, extremely lifelike representations of Nature such as a blade of grass, which, at the same time, are also artificial since they take the form of photographs.

Come un limone lunare (Like a lunar lemon) is a work-exhibition of Francesco Simeti‘s experimental artistry. Over the years the artist has compiled an archive of images taken from the most disparate sources: the pages of newspapers, herbaria, Renaissance notebooks, rural iconography, agricultural and botanical handbooks, and essays on ornithology and the natural sciences. Images that combine to form a visual inventory of our neglected and wounded landscape, whose features and forms are reiterated in a network of relations that we have not yet fully understood.

Reflecting on the nature of images seen as fossils of the future, Simeti returns to certain key issues for his research in this new project: the environmental crisis, the drama of war and the displacement of people it entails, the coexistence of real and artificial, past and future, physical and digital… but “what will these images tell us about ourselves?”

The exhibition is accompanied by an artist’s workshop specially devised by Francesco Simeti, which will be run by Enrica Carini in conjunction with the exhibition.

A public programme of events on the content of this project is being curated by EN Laboratoriocollettivo.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication by Mousse Publishing with written contributions from Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and Gianluca Concialdi.

We would like to thank Heallo and Francesca Minini Gallery for their cooperation.

Francesco Simeti (b. 1968, Palermo, Italy) is an artist known for his site-specific installations, which aesthetically present enchanting scenes that reveal a more complex subtext upon closer inspection. His work often appropriates photographs from newspapers and magazines to raise questions about the role of images in contemporary discourse.

Public Art is a fundamental aspect of his practice, he has worked with Percent for Art and Public Art for Public Schools in NYC, the Multnomah county in Oregon and has created permanent additions to subway stations in Brooklyn and Chicago.

He has had solo exhibitions at venues such as Assembly Room, New York, (2019); Open Source Gallery, New York (2017); Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Palermo (2012); and Artists Space, New York (2009). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Museo Civico di Castelbuono, Palermo (2019); ICA Singapore (2017); Palazzo Reale, Milan (2016); and Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin (2014). He has also exhibited work at the Triennale di Milano (2014 and 2013). Simeti lives and works in New York. He works with the gallery Francesca Minini in Italy. He is currently a resident at ISCP – International Studio & Curatorial Studies, New York. He is involved in ongoing design collaboration with Maharam, New York.