The title of the exhibition evokes Giorgione‘s famous portrait of an old Venetian woman, La Vecchia, or more precisely the inscription in her hand warning of the passing of time (Col tempo – with time).
Bianka Dobó‘s exhibition as the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Godot Art Fair, during her 2018 fellowship in Rome, complemented and elaborated on her series of frottages of reliefs from the tomb stones on the floor of the Basilica di Santa Maria in Aracoeli.
The embroideries that complement the prints imagine the damage to the tombstones, the repairs and replacements, as a kind of symbolic, artistic reconstruction that evokes details that have become obscure.
Over time, the footprints of worshippers and other visitors have worn away the rich decoration and inscriptions on the gravestones to such an extent that their original appearance can only be guessed at. The inscriptions and reliefs on the stones slowly disappear as the steps are damaged, and the memory of the people on them is forgotten as time passes.
During the physically demanding process of frosting, which takes several hours, the artist rubs the patterns of the gravestones onto canvas with a graphite stamp. The gesture of making an imprint is a way of capturing a fragment of passing time. By transferring the reliefs to another medium, he protects the images, and thus the memory of the dead, from disappearing. Although forgetting is a natural end to the process of remembering, the preservation of memorials is a pure, humane act.