Monica Vecchiotti : Layers

Verità, Ceramic Stoneware, Stain, Glaze, 33.5cm x 25.5cm x 26.5cm, 2025

Layers

Monica Vecchioti

13 - 27 Sept

Memory doesn't keep things exactly as they were: It layers one version over another, softening some details, sharpening others and occasionally inventing a few. What's left resembles the original without quite replicating it.

This body of work sits inside that gap. A column, once architectural and solid, resurfaces here as a vessel in its own right, hollow, with faces hand-built onto its crown, no longer holding up a building, just holding the memory of one. A vase carries a pair of winged horses either side of, and above, the word "Hope," equal parts myth and wishful thinking. One piece holds an angel's face at its front, mouth open like Rome's Bocca della Verità, whose mouth is said to bite down on the hand of anyone who lies. Leaves climb its sides, and heavy browns pool at its base beneath glazes left to run and settle where they please. Elsewhere, a two-faced vessel carries the words "Power Position" inside, visible only if you look in; a separate piece coils with snakes; and a Romulus and Remus scene reappears with a twist, the wolf replaced by a cat.

Across other vessels, doorways multiply alongside watching eyes, suggesting not just several versions of a story, but the many possibilities and decisions branching from each one. A small run of wall masks extends the same faces off the vessels and onto the wall itself, an angel, a liar, an echo of the Bocca della Verità mouth, still watching, still ready to judge.

Each surface is built in the same way: layers of stain, underglaze and oxide, muted, dripped and weathered under glaze, so that no single layer tells the whole story. What surfaces first is rarely what's underneath.

The work draws on Roman ruin, Baroque excess, myth and superstition, treated with more irreverence than solemnity. The result sits somewhere between relic and invention: objects that feel recalled rather than made, as though they'd always existed and simply resurfaced, slightly changed, the way something remembered always is.