Installation view

Alina Vergnano, Spacious Present

Alina Vergnano,
End to start, 2022

Alina Vergnano, Distances

Alina Vergnano,
Dissolve Feelings, 2022

The title Tenses refers directly to the concept of time, which serves as the point of departure for Vergnano's series of paintings. In the Oxford Dictionaries, time is explained as an indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. This progression and the way it is perceived and experienced is highly variable and subjective, depending on the events and feelings with which it is filled. 

As Virginia Woolf puts it, “An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second.” She further states, that this “extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.” An investigation Vergnano pursues with her paintings in which the line serves as the center and dances along the progression of time—a progression that is not necessarily linear, but elastic. Moving freely between tenses, sometimes clear, sometimes blurred, it refers to our perception of time and our relationship to memory. Vergnano plays with the form of the human body, which guides the composition. Although often concealed or partially hidden, the body stays present under the layers of the artworks. 

The very process of creating these artworks, with their different layers, the washing of the canvas and the use of the raw material, is an organic resonance and a way of working related to the working of time. 

Tenses revolves around an exploration of the concept of time, different tenses, human perception and its translation into a process of creating artworks that balance between abstraction and figuration.  

Alina Vergnano, Spacious Present

Alina Vergnano, Gliding Tempo

Alina Vergnano, Distances

Dancing along the progression of time

The title Tenses refers directly to the concept of time, which serves as the point of departure for Vergnano's series of paintings. In the Oxford Dictionaries, time is explained as an indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. This progression and the way it is perceived and experienced is highly variable and subjective, depending on the events and feelings with which it is filled.

As Virginia Woolf puts it, “An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second.” She further states, that this “extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.” An investigation Vergnano pursues with her paintings in which the line serves as the center and dances along the progression of time—a progression that is not necessarily linear, but elastic. Moving freely between tenses, sometimes clear, sometimes blurred, it refers to our perception of time and our relationship to memory. Vergnano plays with the form of the human body, which guides the composition. Although often concealed or partially hidden, the body stays present under the layers of the artworks.

The very process of creating these artworks, with their different layers, the washing of the canvas and the use of the raw material, is an organic resonance and a way of working related to the working of time.

Tenses revolves around an exploration of the concept of time, different tenses, human perception and its translation into a process of creating artworks that balance between abstraction and figuration. 

Amira Hartmann