Sono

Bianca Boscu / Emanuela Campoli are pleased to announce Sono, Rebecca Watson Horn’s first solo exhibition in Italy at Villa di Geggiano, Siena.

Rebecca Watson Horn’s text-based works investigate the mutable relationship of language and meaning through the medium of painting. The viewer cannot read the paintings in a conventional sense, neither is there a code to decipher. Letter forms emerge and recede until language flutters at the edge of abstraction, creating a tension between what words communicate and what they conceal. In this process, her paintings become sigils — a term borrowed from medieval occult traditions.

In the present work, Horn turns her attention to current political speech, its ritualized forms and residues. The title of the show, Sono (the Italian word for “I am”), evokes both the affirmative presence of the artist, and at the same time, references Georgia Meloni’s speeches meant to reclaim power for traditional values and subject positions.

In the Sigils, the burlap’s porosity and rough weave demand layer upon layer of paint, creating a built-up texture where shapes arise and fade. In the tension between what is revealed and hidden, no background is blank or neutral, but rather charged with a topography of actions.

Installed in the Chapel, Horn’s Semaphores take a different approach to abstracing language, as well as materiality, volume and speed. In this series, letter shapes are poured in acrylic (rather than oil) onto an open-weave burlap, leaving little room for the corrections and successive layering of the Sigils. The Semaphores spatialize the transparency and layers present in the Sigils, pushing them further into three-dimensional form.

Rebecca Watson Horn (Boston, 1981) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA from The Cooper Union, an MFA from Rutgers University, and attended The Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles. Horn’s recent solo exhibitions include The Secret Life of Vowels at Emanuela Campoli in Paris (2024); Sigils at Auroras in São Paulo (2023); letters as such at Deli Gallery in New York (2023); Rebecca Watson Horn at White Columns in New York (2017); Rub It In at Soloway in Brooklyn (2011). Horn presented works fromher Semaphores series in the collaborative project Sounds the Mouth Can’t Make with choreographer Andros Zins-Browne and designer Victoria Bartlett at Canepa Selling in Los Angeles (2023). Her work has been featured in several group exhibitions such as A study in Form (Chapter Two) , curated by Arden Wohl, at James Fuentes in New York (2023); always in my room bc I put effort into it & I love the vibe of my lights at Starr Suites in Brooklyn (2023); The Practice of Everyday Life at Derosia in New York (2022). As a member of the collective Canaries, she participated in an exhibition at Cleopatra’s in Brooklyn (2014) and a residency at Recess in New York (2016).