Double Sun

I think about light a lot. Even as a kid, I’d fiddle with the lighting in our computer room, insisting to my bewildered brother that I couldn’t join him in whatever game we were playing until the overhead was switched off and the lamps were turned on. It’s the first thing I notice in a space, in a photograph, in a film. I can’t remember how I first heard about Viganella, a small village in northern Italy that receives no direct sunlight for 83 days every winter, but I was instantly fascinated by the story—and by the town’s solution. In 2006, the villagers installed an enormous mirror in the mountains above them that tracks the sun’s movements, reflecting light into the main piazza during those otherwise unilluminated days. They call it soledoppio, their double sun.

When I visited Viganella in 2014, the mirror was broken, stuck in a position that reflected sun not on the piazza but instead on the roof of the mayor’s house and a few side streets. In the absence of light, it took 24 hours for me to start feeling sad; after 48, I was nearly inconsolable. I stayed in a hotel with no other guests; I was literally by myself. The owner Ornella would prepare me a feast—passatelli in brodo and straccetti di pollo agli agrumi one evening, saccottini al ragu bolognese and carpaccio di carciofi con parmigiano reggiano e noci another—and then drive home to Milan for the night.

Snow and clouds kept everyone inside for the first few days of my visit. When the weather cleared, I ventured out and met some of the town’s residents: Mayor Pierfranco Midali and engineer Giacomo Bonzani, who conceived of and designed the soledoppio together; a young woman named Erica and her dog Easy; a man named Mario who warned me about the town’s ghosts and another named Sergio who was hurrying to see the visiting doctor. Taking advantage of the reflected light, people strolled through the streets, catching up with neighbors, making shadow puppets on the walls. I read some time later that the mirror had since been repaired and once again brightens the piazza from November to February. I hope I can get back to Viganella to see it.

—Jon Pack

All images: untitled, digital c-prints, 2014.

Sono

History is taught as progress, but there’s something false in the idea that events move in a linear fashion, in one direction. When I look at history, I see what’s lost between the past and present, the material debris, the unrealized lives, all of which cannot be addressed by a forward-looking narrative. This is why I embrace a process of rubbing away and erasure in my text-based paintings, where language emerges and recedes, and letters flutter at the edge of abstraction. The viewer cannot read these paintings in a conventional sense, nor is there a code to decipher. However, in response to the horror beyond comprehension that we’ve all been witnessing, livestreamed to the phones we hold in our hands and stash in our pockets, one painting broke through with an offer of explicit legibility. In “Sigil 81” (2024), the letters “C-S-F-R” allow the viewer to fill in the gaps and read “CEASEFIRE,” a reminder that the violence outside the gallery is ongoing. This painting led me to reorient my process toward an exploration of the rhetoric that enables such violence.

The works in this portfolio are mainly from my most recent exhibition at Villa di Geggiano, Siena, in which I turned my attention to current Italian political speech. Inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s writings about the emergence of populist ideologies—he described them as “the monstrous, rigorous fruit of successive residues, sedimentations and survivals”—I wanted to explore Giorgia Meloni’s 2019 speech in which she personalized a political movement that seeks to reclaim traditional values. I titled the series Sono, Italian for “I am,” in order to evoke a tension between the presence of the artist and the well-known refrain of Meloni’s speech (“Sono donna”). While acknowledging the way her rhetoric worked on my emotions, I disentangled the historical “residues” in what she was saying by fragmenting the phrases on my canvases.

Once having turned my painterly observations toward the kind of doublespeak present in that speech, I began exploring the residues of the past in Meloni’s slogan “Dio, patria e famiglia” (“God, homeland and family”), with its origins in Italy’s earlier nationalist and fascist movements, as well as in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and in Netanyahu’s “Our victory will be your victory.” Circulating as fragmented sound bites in the media, these apparently simple and affirmative slogans conceal their racist and xenophobic essence while exhuming rhetorics of the past.

In these paintings, grappling with the regressive political language of our time, I explore the contaminations the past leaves with us, pulling us backward while altering our perception of the present.

—Rebecca Watson Horn

From top to bottom: Sigil 81: oil on burlap, 39” x 31”, 2024. Sigil 87: oil on burlap and canvas, 61” x 49.2”, 2024. Sigil 89: oil on burlap and canvas, 61” x 49.2”, 2024. Sigil 90: oil on burlap and canvas, 67” x 54”, 2025. Sigil 91: oil on burlap, 67.25” x 53.25”, 2025. Sigil 92: acrylic and oil on burlap, 48” x 40”, 2025. Sigil 93: oil on burlap and canvas, 67” x 53”, 2025. Sigil 94: oil on burlap and canvas, 67” x 53”, 2025.