BETWEEN THE THRESHOLDS OF THE LIVING
Günter WESELER | Chiara LECCA | Emil LUKAS
Curated by Beatrice Zanello
Opening
Wednesday, October 29 | Piazza Cioccaro 11, LUGANO
Thursday, November 6 | Via Gorani 8, MILAN
Galleria Allegra Ravizza is pleased to announce the exhibition “Between the Thresholds of the Living”, a group show by three artists to be hosted in Lugano at Piazza Cioccaro 11 and simultaneously in Milan at Via Gorani 8. The exhibition will be open by appointment until February 6, 2026.
The exhibition stages a dialogue between three artists: Günter Weseler (Allenstein, 1930 – Düsseldorf, 2020), Chiara Lecca (Modigliana, 1977) and Emil Lukas (Pittsburgh, 1964), who — some by choice, others by birth — share a life experience deeply rooted in a natural, pastoral environment, distant from frenzy, artificiality and urban alienation, where daily life is measured by the rhythm of nature and where the presence and relationship with animals is habitual, familiar, and an integral part of a domestic and social context based on harmonious coexistence. This closeness has shaped the sensitivity of the artists, giving rise to an art that does not merely observe nature but inhabits and lives it. In this way, the position of humans is moderated: they cease being protagonists and become active spectators in a biocentric artistic narrative.
Each of the artists in the exhibition, in their own language, problematizes the boundary between human and non‑human, exploring the threshold that divides life from death through artistic practices capable of destabilizing the spectator’s perception and creating estrangement and ambiguity.
Walking a subtle ridge of opposites, the Romagnol artist Chiara Lecca investigates the relationships between nature and artifice, organic and inorganic, human and nature, and probes through the animal world the realm of the human and collective consciousness. Devoid of any judgment, the artist overturns the cultural codes that canonicalize the distinction between human, animal, and nature, reinterpreting the pastoral and agricultural context in which she has lived her daily life since birth. Her works appear, at first glance, as reassuring sculptures and comforting design elements: rich bouquets of flowers arranged in refined vases and austere marble totems seem to decorate exhibition rooms — until visual anomalies begin to intervene, tearing away the initial veil of extreme realism to reveal a perceptual deception. On closer inspection, one recognizes that the “flowers” are not flowers but parts of taxidermized animals, and the “marble” is “fake marble” of animal provenance. In this way the artist playfully and lightly subverts visual and conceptual expectations tied to materials, playing on their semantic ambiguity to provoke an aesthetic-visual reaction combining fascination and repulsion. The viewer, in a state of disorientation and confusion, is thus prompted to reflect on the promiscuity inherent between life and death, natural and artificial, until that conceptual and stereotyped barrier dividing the human from the non‑human collapses. Through these works, Chiara Lecca aims to evoke, with irony, feelings of discomfort and unease in order to normalize the presence of the animal and its carnality in an urban context long habituated to distancing itself from the non‑human and its death.
Of a similarly hybrid nature — between natural and artificial, human and non‑human — are Günter Weseler’s Atemobjekte, furred objects that reproduce the rhythmic elements of breathing via an electromechanical mechanism. Initially conceived in painterly form and transformed into sculptural objects from 1964 onward, these creations condense the artistic and conceptual essence of his work by combining the acoustic and visual components. At the time, due to throat problems, breathing and its rhythm became for the artist the subject of an almost neurotic inquiry that accompanied him until the end of his career. From his earliest exhibitions, Weseler learned that his breathing objects can “take life” and adopt a character capable not only of altering their surrounding environment but also of intimidating, frightening, intriguing and alerting the viewer. The Atemobjekte gain thus enigma and ambiguity as catalysts of a process of awareness and cognition that generates an environment able to stimulate certain mental and emotional reactions in the spectator: a spatial structure is created in which the spectator is included, just as happens with Chiara Lecca’s works, albeit in a more ironic and lighter language.
While the first breathing objects essentially lived off the contrast between mechanical artificiality and material naturalness and the relationship between the object and the surrounding — in a sense civilized — environment, in the 1980s a notable shift toward organicity and harmonization occurred, aided by the rediscovery of ancient breathing techniques.
Although not assignable to any specific artistic movement, Günter Weseler’s art may be understood as an example of “organic kineticism,” in which time and change intertwine with latent forces of the psychological and imaginary realms. The centrality of movement and its phenomenality are explored from the earliest painterly representations as indispensable elements for defining life. Using egg tempera, Weseler depicts bodily structures and organic silhouettes, full of energy and vitality, opposed to more solid and defined forms, choosing to restrict his chromatic palette to a single color: black. In the 1960s the artist favored pronounced plasticity in his painted works, deriving from the initial abundance of color and its rapid transfer across the surface.
Materiality, temporality and kinetico‑organic movement thus become constitutive elements of Weseler’s art, prerequisites of an experiential content that qualifies his entire artistic activity. These principles are also found in the art of Emil Lukas, who dialogues with nature and interacts with animal/natural and human materiality, making them the fulcrum of his conceptual research. On display is his series Larva Paintings, for which Lukas uses fly larvae which, in contact with a viscous mixture and pigment, sometimes guided by shadows and light, trace lines on the panel and draw unexpected ink paths with an almost calligraphic stroke. As in many of Weseler’s paintings, the work begins from an initial chromatic trace that marks the pictorial surface as the origin point of the process, activating a dynamic of transformation that guides its entire development. Thus the surface transcends its role as mere support, becoming the space of the creation process, the stage of the artistic event and the witness to the force of interaction between nature and matter under the artist’s vigilant direction. The surface thereby acquires its own complex depth. Through this process, Lukas creates works that are the result of a living, organic dynamic, accepting the element of unpredictability of nature and the cooperation between human and non‑human as integral parts of the aesthetic‑artistic process.
In line with the same procedural and creative technique is Günter Weseler’s Amazzonia series: wild vegetation carpets born in the winter of 1990, composed of a thick blanket of moss laid over a glass surface. Through the natural drying process, the grassy carpet fragments into small pieces and the blue hue emerges, creating an aerial photograph of a woodland landscape with a mirror‑like water body. Thus a fractal landscape emerges, similar to satellite images of tropical regions dominated by forests and jungles. In these works the element of water becomes central thanks to its mirror‑like and reflective nature, which gives it structure and spatial three‑dimensionality. Water becomes for Weseler a symbol of knowledge and the depth of the unconscious, giving rise to a new intangible level, a new reality: “I would like to call it ‘energetic level’ in contrast to the tactile reality that lies in front of the reflective surface.” [1] Thus three realities are generated: a first perceptible and tactile level; a second level created by the reflective capacity of the glass that incorporates the reality behind the viewer into the work; finally, a third reality behind the glass — the realm of the unconscious, the suspected, the intuitive — which emerges from the depths. In these works emerges a heightened attention to harmonization and the observation of changes in organic processes, typical of Lukas’s processual art.
Lukas’s Larva Painting series lies on the invisible boundary separating life from death: “The works in the series take their start from the unique scent of death. This odor attracts flies searching for a place to deposit their eggs so as to ensure species continuity. The final result of the painting is generated by ink and paint on canvas that suggest depth through a series of overlays. In creating these paintings, the chemistry of the surface, moisture, light, and color are crucial — all in relation to the life cycle of the fly. The idea is simple: life, death, and some things between the two…”[2] As written above, such dualism between life and death is also present in Chiara Lecca’s works, who, like the American artist, investigates it in an entirely natural way, portraying death as an inescapable part of the life cycle without attributing to it any dramatic tragic dimension.
The exhibition proposes a path through works of great contemporary sensitivity, capable of reflecting on the relationship between human, nature and artifice, and opening a broader and more conscious dialogue on what is living, organic and invisible.
[1] Günter Weseler in “Im Zentrum des Zyklos – Die Stille” 2001
[2] Emil Lukas in un’intervista di Maria Cristina Strati, pubblicata su Juliet n. 152, maggio 2011