ANYA PESCE

Her works are like bodies that show the signs of the history that has passed through them, changing bodies, forged by the fire of experience, absorb light and reflect it creating shadows. The matter becomes skin that stretches creating a visual story where each work is an autonomous fragment of a complex Universe.

In fact, Anya Pesce’s works can always be composed in a different way and always return new visual balances, like single notes of a musical score that never exhausts the infinite world of sounds and its combinations.

Over the years, the artist has made a very precise path of formal research, starting from the Finish Fetish movement of the 60s, which then led her to develop different expressive modes, thus finding her own language that identifies and differentiates her, her own alphabet that then allows her infinite formal solutions. It all starts from an intuitive cell from which everything springs. This is called “Inspiration”. An emotional spark that arises from an apparent void. The realization must then take place in a very short period of time because the needs of the material she uses and its fusion do not allow second thoughts in the act of creation. The plate or sheet of PMM is a page on which to imprint and fix the instant of a thought with a strong and decisive gesture. A vital breath that modifies and shapes the material and transforms it, as in martial arts a board is broken at the exact point where it is to be cut. This is a technique that requires strength and implies a lot of concentration.

From a frontal position, Anya Pesce’s sculptures appear almost two-dimensional, while by getting closer, changing the observation point or modifying the position of the light, they reveal themselves in all their three-dimensionality. They demonstrate a pictorial heritage, the result of previous studies by the artist who has experimented in the past with other expressive forms linked to painting.

The color – material has been extensively explored by her in the sensoriality of effects, shiny, translucent, opaque, in shades of white, gold, red and black and then extended to new color ranges that represent new challenges for the artist, as in this solo exhibition where the chromatic research has extended to more calm and natural tones.

The palette varies from grays to brown to beige, including blue and tangerine. These are works that reveal an earthly energy declined to natural elements through an abstract reconfiguration of the material. In particular, in this exhibition, the gesture and action of the creative moment are emphasized, which are imprinted in the work like a dance.

And the acrylic PMM shaped by Anya Pesce lends itself well with its shine and tactility to its expressive purpose that goes beyond and goes beyond the meaning of Finish Fetish, offering us a unique perceptive experience. Shape, color, surface and touch: all these elements are part of a single visual flow. Her abstract fetish is more minimalist than pop. It is anything but decoration or formal and aesthetic satisfaction. But while in Finish Fetish the work seemed “produced”, indeed its characteristic of “production” was exalted, Anya’s works highlight and underline the artist’s gesture and touch, the human factor prevails over the exaltation of the industrial product.

The work is the symbol of the object of desire, it seduces you, it attracts you, it is a sort of abstract representation of the libido. It is the symbol of an illusory object, at times deceptive because it appears for what it is not, a hard surface that seems soft, a light that changes direction and places the work in a space that varies and transforms the object. They recall the body and what covers it, like membrane and drape, with folds, evolutions and twists, they evoke the memory of the body.. In this operating system there is no representative will, but only energy.

The matter yields to the gesture like an elastic body because Anya’s sculptures, on the border between art and design, evoke an implicit body, the energy of a body that moves the matter, the passage of a being that grazes with its breath and gives shape and takes shape in the body of the work, simulates its skin, its flesh, its movement. This process takes place on the sphere of the invisible, because the body is not there, its essence remains imprinted in the matter, a sensuality that goes beyond, an abstract modality, the Abstract Fetish.

For Anya the matter on which she works is more than matter, it is a sensitive field, it is her ally because it allows her to embody her vital drive. All the artist’s research means that in the end desire is never for the object itself, but for the void it represents. Anya’s forms are the imprint of a body that is a reflection and a mental projection. What is certain is that in Anya Pesce’s work matter and desire meet. They are a way of resisting time, inertia, a luminous trace that remains. And in this surplus of reality, “creating – as Deleuze stated – is resisting”. Creating is resisting because every gesture that leaves a mark is already a refusal of oblivion. And for Anya Pesce, every work that is born is also a symbolic act of faith in the fact that the world can still be transformed. – Stefania Carrozzini, July 2025