«Casabase», an exhibition investigates spaces and landscapes within the home – Corriere.it

«Casabase» is a term linked to baseball that indicates the tile to which one returns after a lap of the field, passing through the intermediate bases, to score. «Casabase» is also the title of Andrea Grotto’s one-man show, which will be inaugurated on 25 May (starting at 6pm) in Milan in the spaces of the Nashira Gallery in via Vincenzo Monti, directed by Ludovica Bifulco, where it will remain open until 15 September.

The works of Grotto (Schio, Vicenza, 1989), a diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, start from questions such as: what is a house? The place where we return every evening after the various daily activities? The place where we sometimes accumulate our personal items, clothes, books, electronic gadgets? There has certainly been a lot of talk in recent years about the home as a space, given that we have been forced into it for a long time.

Grotto has worked hard on the importance of arrangement of furniture and points of light and to appreciate the potential of materials and professional techniques that normally go beyond the artistic field, but also to study, read and try to bring back into his works the values ​​and ideas that make a house «the» home.

«Casabase» is also the title of the painting that opens the exhibition, a painting whose workmanship and colors can recall the graffiti of the first cavemen such as, for example, those of the Lascaux caves in France. In 1794 the French intellectual Xavier de Maistre wrote I travel around my room, in which he narrates his explorations in the stories of the objects, paintings and clothes that surround him, real explorations made only with the mind. Andrea Grotto does the same thing with the works on display, in which he reports i landscapes caught in his home walls.

The exhibition also has to do with the objects that are handed down in the family, understood not only as a transmission of affection, but also of knowledge and know-how: the old wooden tables used by his grandfather to work become chairs and benches for Grotto in which to insert his own works; the centerpieces made by the crochet grandmother the bases with which to create ceramics and terracotta.