Alfredo Aceto, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Lupo Borgonovo, Andrea Kvas, Nicola Martini, Nico Vascellari
24/06/2016 > 30/07/2016
Opening on 23/06/2016, from 7 pm to 9 pm
The exhibition Il principio è solo e solo un centro spostato verso il centro displays the works of six young Italian contemporary artists: ALFREDO ACETO, GIORGIO ANDREOTTA CALÒ, Lupo BORGONOVO, ANDREA KVAS, NICOLA MARTINI and NICO VASCELLARI. It takes its title from a work realised in 1970 by Vincenzo AGNETTI, one of the main Italian representative of conceptual art. He greatly influenced the young generation of Italian contemporary artists, whom practices and productions deeply echo AGNETTI's statement engraved in his work: "the beginning is only and only a centre displaced to the center". The beginning of a work comes from the displacement from a concept–centre of reflection–to the form–centre of projection, of production and of attention. The displacement is the creative process. Through duplications, reflects, gesture's repetitions and modulations, the exhibition underlines this poetic filiation through the investigation of these six young artists' creative process.
In his sound installation Modesty or Surprise, ALFREDO ACETO (b. in Turin in 1991, lives and works in Paris) reproduces the roar of the famous movie monster Godzilla by appropriating elements used by the production studios to create the sound effects for it: slamming car doors, hands covered in tarmac slapping the chords of a violin, the sound of footsteps, etc. The soundtrack created thus "serves as a backdrop for the non-linear development of the story generated by my work. In a way, it is the soundtrack of my life. It is the result of an attempt to reconstruct an essential sound that has always closely underpinned all my work, replacing the city of Burbank with the city of Pripyat–the subject and focal point of my practice".
GIORGIO ANDREOTTA CALÒ (b. in Venice in 1979, lives and works in Amsterdam and Venice) presents a series of polaroids (Père Lachaise) that are cut up and split in two to allow for the appearance of details from the emulsion layers of the image. Part-visual notes, part-sensory reminiscences, these ephemeral images, which document a place for strolling cherished by the artist, capture moments and impressions, and constitute a range of melancholic single space-time reflections, frozen and mirror-like. The bronze sculpture of a bird (Untitled (Bird / Skull)) is imbued with the same melancholy. GIORGIO ANDREOTTA CALÒ reproduces the effect of the erosion of wood by seawater in the extension of its plumage, situating the piece between ruin and still life.
Lupo BORGONOVO (b. in Milan in 1985, lives and works in Milan) blends and drawing in a collection built around the inspection and modulation of matter within an aquatic universe, in which the play of reflection, symmetry and mirror effects are conducive to journeys of the mind. Based on distinct stories and references, the pieces together form the logbook of an invisible and imaginary sailor, linking the aesthetic of ruins to the contemporaneity of form and matter. The series entitled Barka is composed by iron-made catamarans that the artist associated with objects he found on Pellestrina's beach, situated in Venice's Laguna. Lupo BORGONOVO thus created boats which seem to have been taken out from the water like would have been recent wrecks. They also are pedestals for the objects in synthetic materials the artist placed on them. These object have been transformed by the natural elements (salt, water, wind), and are somewhat crystallized between past and future. Torta is a bronze casting based on a wood model formerly used in the production of hats, and cut in five pieces. Alternately a pattern, a cake or a mooring bollard, this sculpture constantly oscillates between reproduction and abstraction. Agua is a series of big format drawings made with felt-tip pen on Chinese paper, and then folded and plunged into water; taken out out and unfolded, they are duplicated on the other part of the paper. Lupo BORGONOVO usually says that he only realises one part of the drawing, the water making the other part.
The pictorial installations of ANDREA KVAS (b. in Trieste in 1986) highlight the interaction between paint and surface. By creating his paintings on adjustable cotton canvases, Andrea KVAS invests them with a singular freedom. By turns folded, unfolded and spread out, his compositions—influenced by both sculpture and performance—allow a colourful star system to emerge. The painting thus becomes not an object of contemplation, but an instrument of choice for opening a dialogue with other objects and environments, and with the public.
NICOLA MARTINI (b. in Florence in 1984, lives and works in Milan) presents Senza Titolo, a series of "notes unfurling in space". These hybrid sculptures are made up of a solid part, using leftover scraps from industrial cast iron mouldings, and a soft part in silicone rubber that highlights their connection and singularity. NICOLA MARTINI aims to isolate and emphasize through this dualism the structure and information present in the original industrial moulding, on the one hand by filling the pores of the recuperated material with a lacquer and graphite solution or with acrylic resin, and on the other by filling the interstices left by the mould with silicone rubber saturated with mineral powder. Combining microscopic and macroscopic scales, NICOLA MARTINI renders visible that which was not.
The series Dripping on the Feet of the Mountain by NICO VASCELLARI (b. in Vittorio Veneto in 1976, lives and works in London and Rome) shares its title with a performance during which the artist made a night-time mountain descent by candlelight, using candles fixed onto a tree branch held at arm’s length and left to extinguish completely before climbing back up the mountain in total darkness. The pieces displayed in the exhibition—aluminium castings of the branch holding the candles—bear testimony to the past performance while prolonging its experience. Through the use of various raw materials and elements (wood and fire) made into objects (torches) and pieces, NICO VASCELLARI highlights their polymorphism and plurivocality, both in space and in time.
NICOLA MARTINI's works were realised with the support of NUOVE // Safond.