Officina Malanotte
Romina Bassu, Andrea Kvas, Matteo Negri, Pierluigi Scandiuzzi
Bonotto Delle Tezze, Vazzola (IT)
May — June 2025
Officina Malanotte
Daniele Capra
The Officina Malanotte artist residency hosted Romina Bassu, Andrea Kvas, Matteo Negri, and Pierluigi Scandiuzzi for a three-week immersion in the estate and wine cellar of Bonotto Delle Tezze. The project unfolded as a space of artistic production and shared living, conceived to bridge the logic of place, local culture, and the world of winemaking with the experimental and cross-disciplinary language of contemporary art.
During her time in residence, Romina Bassu focused on representations of the female figure, portraying young women suspended in states of existential solitude and quiet melancholy. These characters appear as if performing on a stage, vulnerable yet resilient, navigating a world shaped by masculine expectations that seek to mold them without regard for their own desires or agency. In Burden, a watermelon cradled in the lap becomes a metaphor for the weight of motherhood, construed as a product of societal imposition. In the small-scale canvas Peep Show, a woman’s foot pokes through a hole in her sock, revealing her toe—a quiet gesture that hints at the anxiety of failing to meet public standards of presentability.
Andrea Kvas produced over a dozen paintings on identically sized canvases (30 x 50 cm), which he installed across various locations within the estate, establishing site-specific visual dialogues. These abstract works are constructed through a material investigation involving pigment and synthetic resins, layered in ever-changing sequences. Kvas paints horizontally, manipulating the chemical interactions of materials to allow for the emergence of thicknesses, unexpected forms, or unique reflections. His process enacts a kind of painterly anarchy—driven by a satisfied pursuit of the unforeseen—inviting the viewer to engage from oblique angles, from below, or by catching the last glimmer of light.
Matteo Negri’s initial works emerged from associations between mechanical components salvaged from the estate’s workshop and various bottle types found on site. He created silicone moulds and cast them in plaster. The series Ai lati d’Italia (“On the sides of Italy”, a palindrome title echoing the symmetrical nature of the forms) features sculptural elements protruding horizontally from the wall, functioning as uncanny presences. Daily Routine is a plaster model of a fisherman’s buoy—soon to be realised in bronze—onto which the artist has assembled casts of everyday objects discovered during the residency: a bundle of asparagus, a power strip, an artichoke. The work is patinated with pigments derived from grape pomace. Man de Toni (“The hand of Antonio”), installed in the garden, is a cast of the vineyard owner’s hand grasping an upside-down bottle of sur lies wine—both intimate and monumental.
Pierluigi Scandiuzzi often painted en plein air during the residency, capturing fragments of the surrounding landscape and the estate’s blooming roses. His En plein airs series features a curious intervention: the frame is not a separate object but is instead painted within the canvas itself. These works subtly reference domestic decorative painting—ubiquitous in many households—void of pretension yet loaded with cultural memory. Quel maledetto gatto (“That Damn Cat”) is a playful attempt to reproduce in two dimensions a ceramic feline found on-site, turning it into a humorous motif that whimsically haunts the artist. In the Still Life series, Scandiuzzi paints his immediate visual field without imposing compositional order—simply registering the accidental presence of objects, resulting in works that oscillate between quiet melancholy and understated joy.
Past editions
2024, 2023, 2022.