Stone Fruit and Paper Insects: Erika Verzutti’s Play with the Soft and the Hard
In the artist’s exhibition at Centre Pompidou, materials are laced with humour and sexual innuendo
The first work that the visitor encounters upon entering the exhibition is Opening with rain (2018), which looks, at first glance, like a large slab of stone. It's actually painted papier maché, with traces of colorful paint – blood-orange, fluorescent yellow and deep turquoise – set into recessed spaces that appear as zoomorphic hieroglyphs, describing something between insect and totem. These markings radiate out from a stone egg suspended within a crater in the lower half of the composition.
Characterised by a common vocabulary of forms, in which eggs feature prominently, much of Verzutti’s work is laced with humour and sexual innuendo. In Boyfriend (2014), for instance, two real ostrich-egg shells poke out from the bottom folds of a velvety looking bronze bed, suggesting at once a sleeping couple, milky-white cleavage and a pair of testicles. Titles often play with the viewer’s perception, as in Centipede (2018): hung high on the wall, the work’s sinuous black silhouette, in conjunction with its title, lends it the appearance of an oversized hundred-legged myriapod. The dark curved forms, which suggest a centipede’s scrabbling legs, are in fact bronze casts of bananas.
