Yuval Avital – Lucus – Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud

Lucus by Yuval Avital
curated by Massimo Guastella
On view from July 16th, 2023 until January 7th, 2024

at Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud, Piazzetta Giorgio Baglivi 4, Lecce

Through the use of numerous mediums (painting, photography, sculpture, sound installations, video art, performance), the artist Yuval Avital develops his works in a variety of spaces, including public places, archaeological sites, factories, theaters and museums of national and international significance. In this solo exhibition, at Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud, Yuval Avital showcases ninety works, some of them specifically made, introducing the viewer to the Lucus, the sacred forest, dear to the ancient Romans but equally regarded by the arts. The artist, in constant search of human traces and ritual recoveries, fascinated by the different identities of places, has designed an exhibition itinerary that intends to create connections with the community and its cultural and natural roots, evoking the remote forested areas covered by the scrub of the Ionian-Salentine peninsula.

The show is developed in four moments, in which the exhibition path unfolds in the spaces of the Biscozzi | Rimbaud Foundation. In the collage of expressive means of his artistic making, he makes coexisting elements seemingly distant from each other by summarizing them. Archaic recall forms, dreamlike paintings, technological plastic-sound assemblages, surreal plaster figurines and light-boxes suggest a metaphor of the Mediterranean landscape, lost but persistent in memory.