Natalie Curtis
‘Because I Want Nothing’
2 November to 22 December 2023
View Exhibition
Related Press:
Hestetika Magazine November 2023
Newsic Magazine November 2023
Se fosse un'orchestra a parlare per noi
Sarebbe più facile cantarsi un addio
Diventare adulti sarebbe un crescendo
Di violini e guai
I tamburi annunciano un temporale
Il maestro è andato via
Metti un po' di musica leggera
Perché ho voglia di niente
Anzi leggerissima
Parole senza mistero
Allegre, ma non troppo
Metti un po' di musica leggera
Nel silenzio assordante
Per non cadere dentro al buco nero[i]
From Musica leggerissima by Colapesce Dimartino
Moon Grove is pleased to announce an exhibition by the Macclesfield-born, Manchester and London-based photographer Natalie Curtis. For this project, Curtis has produced twelve concise images, glimpses of the artist’s life between 2021 and the present. Taken during lockdown and printed in late 2023, the exhibition speaks of a transformation between two dramatically different times. Depicting three main subjects – railway landscapes in Cheshire, a suburban garden in north London and portraits taken on walks in Highgate and Salford – each image dwells on periods of internment, forbidden travel and attempts at intimacy. Together with changing perspectives of this time in the present – including elements of amnesia; a bafflement with the past and the everyday practical realities of active life in Lombardy and the UK in the present – Curtis’ works dwell on a shift in locations and her ongoing itinerant existence.
With the exhibition's title taken from a line in the 2021 track Musica leggerissima, a hit in Italy by the duo Colapesce Dimartino, the exhibition reinterprets the song’s message at a time of post-isolation within a pattern of conflicting viewpoints. In concrete terms, ‘wanting for nothing’ oscillates between ideas of privilege (I want for nothing), stoicism, ethical self-denial, a drive for aesthetic autonomy, and an almost absurd existential nihilistic rejection of mainstream politics. Through this spartan desire for disinterested truth, Curtis’ work exists in a gap that contradicts polarities exemplified by the agenda of western culture wars, alongside false moral sanctities and the real violence enacted by oppressive regimes in a global context.
Aside from this, Curtis’ miniature works – which have a dark, ephemeral, ethereal, and otherworldly character redolent of northern British semi-rural, semi-urban areas – hold the quality of small paintings, a fact that serves to help them act as mysterious vignettes that invite the eye in to examine uncertain ineffable worlds.
Influences on the artist include the photographer Daido Moriyama; Saintscapes, a book conceived by artist Claudio Beorchia consisting of images related to votive shrines from the Italian region of Lombardy; subjects including James Ellroy’s L.A., Joseph Knox’s Manchester and Alan Garner’s Cheshire; painter Milton Avery’s formal dance between landscape and abstraction, with its historical link between Matisse and Ab-Ex; and Duane Michals, one of the twentieth century’s most innovative photographers. This exhibition will conclude with the launch of a limited artist’s ‘zine based on the work in the exhibition.
Natalie Curtis (b. 1979, Macclesfield), lives in Manchester / London, UK and works wherever her camera takes her. She has exhibited in Manchester’s Piccadilly Station (2016) with her light box installation SWAYS Stills and her debut gallery show, Malibu Night Waves, was held in Paris in (2020). She is represented by Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Paris and by Artimage, London.
[i] Translation: If it were an orchestra speaking for us, It would be easier to sing goodbye, Becoming an adult would be a crescendo, Of violins and trouble, The drums announce a storm, The teacher has left, Put on some light music, Because I want nothing, Indeed very light, Words without mystery, Cheerful, but not too much, Put on some light music, In the deafening silence, To avoid falling into the black hole.
