SERIES:
MACULA /
The Theater is in The Mind
2017-2020

MACULA is an exploration of the correlation between distorted vision and distorted perception, Age-Macular Degeneration and the fictive visual perceptions of the Charles Bonnet Syndrome.
The whole research is based on an archive of 7 years of voice notes recordings of the artist’s mother, diagnosed with Age-Macular Degeneration in 2002 and experiencing fictive visual perceptions since 2012.
Through her voice diary, she describes her experience of what it means to live into a world made of increasing darkness, where she can’t tell the difference between what is real - and exists - and what is an hallucination - and doesn’t exist.
Her first-person voice notes inspired the whole project.
Her personal experience as the description of a much larger experience, shared by many.
  FRANCESCO ZORZI (Italy) Francesco Zorzi is a multidisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam working with a wide variety of mediums, informed by his background in design, his love for the world of Color and his fascinations into the mechanics of vision, perception and interpretation of reality. His works are united by the quest for the qualities of what makes us ‘human’, reflecting on how we interact with what’s in front of our eyes, how we make sense of it and how we explore the inner-worlds we create with it. His explorations - whether dissecting Colors or Shapes - can be seen as an ongoing study on the structure of their inner components and the interaction between each other. These abstract configurations are like fragments of a kaleidoscope in perpetual movement without a beginning or an end, offering the viewers a moment of reflection, new playgrounds for exploration and wonder. His visually ambiguous wax-crayons works, are an investigation on Color in itself: its visual perception as well as the duality of Color as both lightwave and matter. Each artwork is the result of a complex layering of various wax-crayons sticks of different tones, applied next to and on top of each other, creating an ever evolving, ever pulsating flux of constant dynamic movement. The appearance of their colors and the structure of their wax influence directly the ways they interact and ‘talk’ with each other, mutually attracting or repelling one another. They can create harmony or tension. Sometimes they blend and dance together at different speed, in an homogenous flow or in multiple streams and directions. Sometimes they clash and come into conflict with one another. These brightly-hued abstract artworks are as much about color as they are of about emotions altogether: on one side they explore the phenomenological impact color has on human perception (seen from the point of view of the viewer being in front of the artworks); on the other they interact with the ineffable emotions and sensations guiding the process of mixing the crayons (seen from the point of view of the artist producing the artworks). The colors of each artwork are immersive, physical and tactile, just like the process of its creation: Ethereal and vibrating but also palpable and present at once.