Galleria Tiziana Di Caro will be hosting in its spaces the fourth solo exhibition by Betty Danon, entitled Tra segno e sogno [Between Sign and Dream], opening on Wednesday 25 September 2024 at 7:00 pm.

The exhibition covers the artist’s production from 1980 to 1990 and includes a selection of works on paper ranging from drawing to collage, to frottage. The title is taken from a notebook in which Danon had collected possible titles for her works, which however she never used.

It was 1979 when Betty Danon wrote a text describing the exhibition experience linked to her work Io&gli altri [I & the Others], following which she decided to “leave the wonderful world of art” because she was disappointed by the rumors that arose following that work.

Therefore, at the beginning of the 1980s the artist stopped attending the conventional circuit of contemporary art, continuing to work for herself and for her artist friends, with whom she never stopped keeping a relationship through the practice of Mail Art.

Hence, there is an almost unpublished production, exhibited very rarely, of which a first nucleus represents the fulcrum of Tra segno e sogno.

Danon was a relentless experimenter and this exhibition proves it. The idea of getting involved with many fields of knowledge, such as the history of art, poetry and philosophy, is widely discussed in this project.

The works present themselves as an incredibly heterogeneous corpus: the path opens with a tribute to Arthur Rimbaud and his poem Le bateau ivre (The drunken boat). Danon creates a series of six small works in postcard format, each of which has a verse inscribed on the front, to which an abstract image is associated. The drunken boat, in Rimbaud’s words, sails on without a crew. It is a metaphor of the human condition, in which the coordinates of space and time are absent. Danon finds herself interpreting an existential situation, which she collects to then make it her own.

In her Green Sounds, the music staff once again becomes a sign and hosts the non-verbal writing that the artist created with great spontaneity and called “the language of angels”, which is complemented by delicate arrangements of small plants and flowers. Nature infiltrates into the sign, tending towards sound, an abstract sound found in all of Danon’s work from those years.

Donna Prima Vera is a series of collages on which the artist worked between 1983 and 1987. The corpus of these works best represents the penchant for experimentation that ran through Danon’s entire artistic career. Here, in fact, the figure of Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera is declined in different ways and representations, using many types of paper, sign, frottage, in a feast of colors that is never extreme, but always delicate.

The exhibition features two specimens of As Prometheus Said. Prometheus is the one who stole fire from the gods to give it to humans and this action is represented by burnt papers that act as a backdrop, here too on the music staff – the set of lines that represent, along with the dot, the two elements on which Danon bases all her poetics.

The exhibition is completed with collages from the Seul le silence series, recently exhibited also at the Panorama Monferrato exhibition. They are small-sized works in which she uses different types of paper, with a prevalence of gold, silver and pastel shades that act as a background to writings, sometimes photocopied, sometimes written in India ink, featuring the artist’s handwriting. These writings stack onto each other following different patterns, and by overlapping they become difficult to decode, so the meaning remains hidden.

The 1980s were a prolific time for Danon’s creativity and related experimentation. What never changes over time is the coherence of her poetics, what she herself called her ultimate goal: the rarefaction of the image-matter, a spiritual-cosmic communication.