David Schutter's Parchment Works at Magazzino, Rome

Magazzino gallery in Rome is presenting an exhibition dedicated to parchment, one of the oldest writing supports. For David Schutter (born 1974 in Pennsylvania), the scratch—an essential intervention for textual overlay—becomes a practice of erasure that marks the various phases of creation and overt destruction of the mark. The installation highlights the vibrant emotional charge of fragmentary traces on dust paper and parchment. The reference to Baroque old masters can be found in the spatial organization of the study sheet, which from evidence of an image becomes its representation. The encounter between Schutter's accumulation of signs and the reduction to neutral white of the walls is so homogeneous that the disorienting representations become a reference point in the visitor's journey through a 'postponed present.' The exhibition runs until July 24, 2016.