Solo Exhibition By Davide Fontana
Curated by Rosalba Colla

dal 3 al 9 agosto 2026 · 19:00-24:00
Villa Cattolica, Sala dell’Edicola
Vernissage, 3 agosto 2026 · 18:30

There is a time when sound is not yet silent and matter continues to vibrate. It is an intermediate space, a threshold where what has happened continues to manifest itself as an echo. Davide Fontana’s work is situated in this perceptual and temporal interval: in the instant following the act of sound, that suspended moment in which the sound dissolves but the trace of its passage continues to sediment in the matter. Sound, the central nucleus of the artist’s research, thus reveals itself not as a simple acoustic phenomenon, but as movement, breath, rhythm: an original experience capable of giving measure to time and form to memory. In this ephemeral dimension, generated by the tension between what vanishes and what remains, Fontana’s works are born.

Drawing and sculpture belong to a single expressive grammar. In the works on paper—#Studio 1, #Studio 2, #Studio 3, #Studio 4, #Studio 5 (2023), Mutismo (2024)—graphite fills the space until it becomes almost solid. Hands, tools, and fragments of figures merge into a single visual pattern, anticipating the progressive dissolution of identity in favor of the permanence of gesture. The body, stripped of its descriptive features, becomes a sounding board permeated by a broader movement, in which individual experience opens up to a universal dimension.

If the sign translates this rhythm into movement, sculpture restores its weight, making tangible what normally belongs to the impalpable. Material thus takes on a central role. Plaster, clay, treated polystyrene, and iron are used not for their formal neutrality, but for their ability to retain time. The rough surfaces, imperfections, stratifications, and grafts reveal a sculpture that seeks permanence rather than completeness. Each work seems to be permeated by a continuous tension between weight and lightness, between immobility and movement, between what is destined to dissolve and what continues to resist.

In large sculptures, such as Accordo (2021) and Eco (2026), the clay left to dry naturally transforms the cracking of the surface into a writing of time. The crack is not a failure of form, but the trace of a process that continues to act within the material.

Within these plastic bodies, musical instruments, hidden and stripped of their function, emerge from the forms like relics of a history of gesture. Deprived of the ability to play, they do not become silent objects, but preserve the memory of a breath, a movement, a relationship.

In his most recent works, this reflection becomes even more essential. In Sospensione (2025), metal structures support rough, calcined surfaces in which the absence of codes to decipher creates a total short circuit, forcing the observer to abandon visual logic and immerse themselves in an internal listening of the void. At the same time, the small concrete figures of Avanguardie (2024), reaching upward like small acoustic pavilions, encapsulate the profound meaning of the entire exhibition: man as a sensitive instrument that collects, preserves, and returns the echoes of the world.

The plastic universe constructed by Fontana does not require a passive gaze, but invites a sensitive participation in the space. Thus a place of resonance emerges, a “silent acoustic” in which the echo continues to exist not as a repetition of a lost sound, but as a new form of presence. His works inhabit precisely this interval, in which matter preserves time and gesture continues, invisibly, to resonate.