Terre Intrecciate

Fitzpatrick Gallery is proud to present Terre Intrecciate, curated in collaboration with Jacopo Mazzetti, at Palazzo Carrozzini (Soleto, Puglia).

Structured in three distinct yet interwoven layers, the exhibition unfolds like a palimpsest—each stratum existing on its own plane, stacked tier by tier. Terre Intrecciate traces a universal longing to grasp the sacred, offering a quiet meditation on transcendence, where the earthly and the ethereal meet in silent dialogue.

With its layered history—as a noble residence and later a tobacco factory—Palazzo Carrozzini becomes a resonant vessel for the exhibition. Its rediscovered frescoes, long obscured, echo the exhibition’s themes of intertwined lives and overlapping histories.

Stratum I: The Suspended Village

The Suspended Village presents the work of Romanian artist Alexandru Chira (1947-2011), whose textured canvases lace pseudo-spiritual iconography, divine communication, and mystical ritualism into his own celestial universe. Inspired by the metaphysical village imagined by Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga, Chira developed an artistic language rooted in the symbolic world of his native village, Tăușeni.

For Chira, the rural environment was more than landscape—it was a cosmic system, a space where memory, myth, and spirituality converged. His hermetic visual language fused drawing, text, and color into intricate compositions that invite both contemplation and decoding. Images communicate like folded messages to the world, where ritualistic structures align with cosmic axes and natural cycles. This fusion of sacred geometry and communal memory remains a testament to Chira’s belief in the transformative power of symbols.

Stratum II: Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit

Across centuries and continents, individuals and societies have approached the ineffable—building structures of spiritual mediation in stone, pigment, cloth, and metal. The works presented here—artifacts and objects gathered from across the globe, from 1 AD through the early 20th century—serve as evidence of a shared and overlapping human urgency to make contact with the sacred.

Religious iconography, has historically served dual functions: to inspire awe and to assert control. This stratum also acknowledges the entangled legacies of empire and extraction, wherein sacred objects were displaced. Severed from their cultural contexts, many artifacts were stripped of the cosmologies they once sustained. And yet, alongside these histories of domination, lies something deeply hopeful: a shared, persistent human impulse to seek transcendence.

Stratum III: Oannes: I, The First Consciousness of Chaos

The exhibition’s final layer assembles works by modern and contemporary artists, as a calibration device that keeps the transcendental inquiries of the show in flux. Rather than grounding the metaphysical in the present, these works reveal the permeability between then and now. Crucially, their presence does not resolve the exhibition’s speculative propositions but agitates them.

These artists introduce tonal shifts—haunted, ecstatic, fragmentary—that complicate any linear reading. The metaphysical is neither recovered nor disavowed, but refracted. What emerges is a layered temporality where past, present, and imagined futures coexist in tension, drawing attention to the act of interpretation itself as a metaphysical gesture.

Image credits:
Installation views by Alice Caracciolo
Additional documentation by Pietro Sfameni

Courtesy of the artists & Fitzpatrick Gallery