Sam Falls at Franco Noero

Galleria Franco Noero is pleased to present Tongues in Trees, Books in Brooks, Sermons in Stones, Sam Falls’ third solo show in Torino, for the first time hosted in the rooms of Piazza Carignano 2.

The exhibition features new bodies of work which find their expression in numerous techniques, from canvases stained by pigments in the open air and by the effect of the atmospheric agents, to colored textile book covers faded by the sun rays, to oil painted photographic prints on canvas, to glazed ceramics set into beams bearing the colored traces of burnt flowers and vegetation. A text has been specially written by the artist to accompany the exhibition, becoming the most appropriate inspired poetical introduction to it:

The skeletal structure of our ribs and the veins of a leaf both yield structure and health. A good painting can reflect the stillness and beauty of a plant, the plant as a subject can carry the narrative of a place and the process of creating art. The shape of a body can tell you many stories and the relationship of two bodies on a single plane can narrow the narrative. After spending countless hours actively viewing nature, handling plants, dis-mantling the dimensions of the environment and reconstructing it into one, I’ve come to feel the life of a plant, to understand something more about stillness and life, creation and death. Sometimes after camping and working outside several nights in the woods where it’s been cold and I’ve eaten all my food and I only have water left but hours to go on the painting, sometimes I feel my bones rigid and slow but my mind as xylem and phloem conducting pure and organic thoughts unfiltered by the rest of the world, and sometimes it’s hard to imagine what else could be necessary except the bookends of our bodies and plants and the space of nature between.

Our spines hold the infinite and the momentary, like the spines of a book or stem of a flower – the spine holds together our central nervous system and every literary narrative – time and space. Our bodies rearrange and grow, they age and give birth, but do they die? The words on the pages of an unopened book are victim to our quantum mechanical era and like every quantum system they are in flux until our observation.