Amanita and Fondazione Iris are pleased to present Desire script, a solo exhibition by WangShui (b. 1986), opening October 24th by appointment in Bassano in Teverina.

Desire script brings WangShui’s practice of mark-making into dialogue with histories of erasure and the contemporary language of code. Working primarily on aluminum, the artist displaces metal through hand etching to create “empty marks” — shallow abrasions and gashes that refract light through subtraction rather than addition. These incisions echo lineages from Cy Twombly’s erasures to ancient calligraphic traditions, where meaning emerges as much from absence as from inscription.

In WangShui’s work, the sequencing of marks resists resolution; it is often unclear which gestures came first, or even which plane of the surface they occupy, as if instructions were embedded like living code, weaving infinite loops into the surface. This ambiguity unsettles linear perspective, evoking the recursive logics of programming as much as the palimpsest of memory. The mark becomes a kind of script: at once a gesture of longing and a program written in negative space. The title evokes both the protocols of desire and the haptics of technology, suggesting that history, memory, and consciousness converge in a field of light, where emptiness itself becomes radiant. Working across film, installation, painting, and sculpture, WangShui has developed a polymorphous practice that traverses trauma, architecture, and media to explore states of metamorphosis and liminality. Their work, often situated between figuration and abstraction, resists fixed narratives in favor of unstable, polyvocal structures. Recent presentations include La Biennale di Venezia (2024), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2023), the Whitney Biennial (2022), and the Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2019).