SIMONETTA MORO BIO

I was born in Italy, in that strip of land in the North-East that the Venetians had already colonized by the 13th century. Venice was created under the sign of nomadism when its inhabitants begun to sail in order to escape the hordes of Attila the Hun who were coming from the East. The city became ever since the cradle of a substantial number of globe-trotters, among which Marco Polo is still remembered as one of the major decoder of “others” languages.
Rosi Braidotti: Nuovi Soggetti Nomadi (Roma 2000).

SIMONETTA MORO studied art in Venice and Bologna (Diploma in Painting, Accademia di Belle Arti). Subsequently she has been living and working in various places in Italy, England, Spain and Germany (co-founder of the printmaking workshop "Atelier il Moro", Bad Kreuznach). MA European Fine Art, Winchester School of Art, 1996; Fulbright Fellowship in Visual Arts, American Academy in Rome, 1999-2000; Ph.D. in Fine Art, studio and theory based, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK, 2003. Her Ph.D. research culminated in the "Reconstructing Babel" project, a site-specific installation at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston, 2002, and in the written thesis: Re-constructing Babel: The History and Creative Possibilities of a Myth Explored Through Text and Installation. Residencies include the Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst in Salzburg, Yaddo and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. In her work she explores a wide range of media, from painting to drawing to printmaking to 3D installations. Teaching is an important part of her creative activity. Simonetta Moro is currently a Faculty in Arts in Context at Eugene Lang College, New York City.

SIMONETTA MORO - In the Forests of Maine...
The ruins of Piranesi are about to collapse. They groan, they cry. . . . The effect of his great buildings is no less extraordinary. They produce vertigo, as if one were measuring them from on high, and when you search for the cause of the emotion that inspires you, you are surprised to tremble in fear on one of their cornices, or to see all the objects turn beneath your eyes from the capital of one of their columns.

The great stair that twist and turns, and the deep vstibule, and the long gallery that leads far off to an even narrower stair, are so obstructed with temporary constructions that it is almost impossible to conceive that the workers can make their way out, and in the imagination one thinks to hear them lament, cry, shout with exhaustion, famine, and despair.

Oh, how will he make his way, the poor Piranesi, between these close-pressing beams and fragile scaffolds that bend and creak? How will he advance across these unstable posts that are joint to each other by narrow and shaky joists? . . . . across this mass of ill-laid stones that overhang and beneath these low and perilous vaults. . . . ? One would follow with unease the subtle path of the lightest lizard!
Piranesi climbs nevertheless, and, even though the mind can hardly imagine it, Piranesi arrives. -He arrives, alas, at the foot of a building similar to the first, access to which presents the same difficulties, menacing him with the same perils, demanding the same effort, in yet greater proportion, magnified by his tiredness, exhaustion, and also his old age. . . . Nevertheless, Piranesi climbs again; he must climb and climb and arrive. -And he arrives. He arrives, overburdened, decrepit, broken, feeble as a shadow; he has arrived at the bottom level of a building similar to the first buildings. . . .

Beyond this, there is nothing but space.

(Charles Nodier, Piranèse, contes psychologiques, à propos de la monomanie réflective, 1836)

Simonetta Moro did this series of works during her residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in the summer 2003. The drawings on display were initially meant to be preparations for fresco paintings, and they explicitely refer to some of Giovan Battista Piranesi's "Carceri" (Prisons). The drawing on the wall is an enlargement of one of the Carceri (# 4 in the exhibition). To make the drawing, graphite dust was pounced through the holes of a large cartoon.

It has been told that the noise of the needle piercing through the paper resembled the sound of a woodpecker.

WOOSTER ART SPACE - 147 WOOSTER STREET - NEW YORK - NY 10012
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PRESS RELEASE

“OUTSIDE / IN”
Elizabeth Demaray / Donna Dennis / Simonetta Moro / Abby Robinson / Nina Yankowitz
curated by Joyce Kozloff

December 2, 2003-January 10, 2004
Opening Reception: Tuesday, December 2, 6-8 PM

Simonetta Moro expands upon the 18th century “Carceri” (prison) renderings of Piranesi. She pricks thousands of dots into large sheets of glassine paper, and then lightly pounds powdered graphite through those tiny holes onto the wall, a literal adaptation of the traditional process for transferring cartoons onto a surface in preparation for fresco. Through dense layers of grisaille overlays, she represents dungeons both as places to take refuge in and escape from, luring the viewer into a mysterious and secret world.

(courtesy Joyce Kozloff, artist and curator)