05/11/2012

Cyprien Gaillard | Urban Failures And Renewals

Cyprien Gaillard | Urban Failures And Renewals

Video, pictures, installations, but also engravings and collage, these are all tools at the service of Cyprien Gaillard (b. 1980, Paris) to depict his personal view of a history of destruction and revival. In the works by the French artist virgin and anthropized nature coexist in landscapes, which plays with past and present days and emerges from smoke, upsetting codified representations. Thick white clouds, ejected from extinguishers, loom over panoramas and encompass them, leaving the viewers destabilized for their lack of common spatiotemporal references.

It could be a fire, the first thing coming to mind while looking at the series of five 35 mm videos entitled Real Remnants of Fictive Wars, or smoke bombs as in the case of the red-blue gangs – hooligans in a Russian suburb – battling in the triptych Desnianky Raion. Land and performative art join together and meet, in a sort of elective affinity, the dramatic and touching music produced by the long-time friend of Gaillard, the celebrated French composer Koudlam.


Focusing on the acts of vandalism that scar the condition of things, and using derelict architecture as both subject and metaphor of his poetic, Cyprien Gaillard shows the transience that surrounds and permeates human beings’ existence and their choices. This way the message turns to a sort of documentary intent, which connects different ages through the concept of transformation. Our time is a time that tends to a progressive atrophy. It is a time of “broken dreams and frustrated expectations”, a period of disenchantment dominated by an ancestral disorder that nevertheless doesn’t necessarily bring contemporary society to an end. According to the pessimistic vision of Max Weber – one of the founders of modern sociology – ideas and beliefs cause social change along with an inescapable failing of tradition due to an ever-increasing rationality. Maybe we are just atomistic, alienated individuals bent to the mass culture industry that determines what we are, or maybe we live in a system governed by an entropic chaos, experiencing it while lingering over the “big moment” to come.


After exhibiting in many of the most important domes of contemporary art such as Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2011, 2008); Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London (2009); MoMA in New York (2010); the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2011), Cyprien Gaillard lands in Italy. Fondazione Trussardi arranged his first solo show at the military bakery of Caserma XXIV Maggio in Milano, entitled Rubble and Revelation – once again the Foundation has been able to seek out a lost treasure of the city and opens its door to a wider audience –, hosting the works of a young artist who shows the traces of the strong relationship between modern cultures and their environment, constraints and chances.


Monica Lombardi

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29/10/2012

Castles in the Air

Castles in the Air

There is always a good reason to move from the centre to the suburbs of Milan to visit Hangar Bicocca, one of the few urban realities seriously involved in furthering contemporary languages.

Entering the huge post-industrial cathedral and crossing the nave, which offers a glimpse on the unique setting created by Carsten Nicolai and Anselm Kiefer’s installations, neatly in a line, you come near to the close space that hosts the latest Tomás Saraceno’s installation.

The Argentine, Saraceno – class 1973, coming from San Miguel of Tucumán – undoubtedly knows about the concept of space. Actually he perfectly knows how to create and order it, how to challenge and match it according to its unexpected forms and evolutions. Being maybe more an architect than an artist, he learned from a mentor such as Peter Cook the necessities of architecture to tend to more radical and utopian shapes and dialogue with the living part of art, and not only with its tradition. For this reason, Saraceno’s artistic alphabet is structured on primary terms that he revisits through a stubborn and scientific study of concepts like shape, space and emptiness.

On Space Time Foam is the latest of these both super complex and simultaneously minimalist constructions, which seems to face off buildings and spaces that host them: going up the scaffold stairs, the visitor gets to an altitude of 20 meters, and once there, he/she can “plunge in” a see-through membrane, suspended in mid-air. A jump, an emotion, an euphoric feeling of lapsing unconsciously into the gravity, but also the bizarre emotion of swimming in a mysterious swimming pool whose surface is influenced by presence, weight and movements of other visitors. Certainly experiencing On Space Time Foam allows you to enjoy the surrounding space in a different way, while on an unconscious level, it helps you to feel tensions and the limits of our body.

An invisible city, a hang structure (made of 99% air) apparently simple, but actually elaborate and stratify, not only from a technical point of view: the three layers that compose the work cover a wide area – almost 1200 square meters – and it has been commissioned to the same firm that works with ESA (European Spatial Agency); but also from a formal/”sculptural” side, along with the conceptual one. Saraceno’s installation is the result of an intense planning work (at the moment 20 people is working at his studio in Berlin), which updates the thousand-year relation between art and science, adding and placing side-by-side the importance of science fictional imagination as a critical element for the Tomás Saraceno’s creations.

Riccardo Conti, Editor’s thanks to Monica Lombardi

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26/10/2012

Time & Space

Time & Space

The ex-colony has colonised the coloniser! Well, not exactly. But the long and sordid history of the UK and Australia has certainly created a fascinating symbiosis between the two cultures, and a strong cultural osmosis from both sides. On Tuesday, Bargehouse opened a 15-artist exhibition, Time & Space, to showcase a cross-section of Australian artists, each of whom has completed a residency in London and many who continue to practice in the UK. The exhibition spans most conceivable medias and mixes artists of different generations to very good effect.


Included in the exhibition are Paul Knight’s intimate, erotic large-scale photographs, a participative painting by Tom Polo and ceramic sculptures by Michelle Ussher, a site-specific tribute to Bargehouse’s former use as factory by Lyndall Phelps and works by Daniel Crooks, Nicole Ellis, Patrick Hartigan, Jacki Middleton, Vanilla Netto and others. The overall effect is compelling, and one gets a sense of a very definite cultural signature that is at once uniquely Australian but clearly informed by British and European sensibilities.


The exhibition is currently running in the Bargehouse space on the South Bank, and is open until this November 11.

Tag Christof

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22/10/2012

A Different Point of View

A Different Point of View

Usually I pick the show I will talk about on Monday art spot following the instinct, my previous knowledge or speaking with the other team guys, but this time things went in another way. I selected five exhibitions I’ve already seen still on view in Milan for a special guest and let her make the choice. My different point of view comes from below, even though it is just a matter of height. The ‘critic in bud’ is Sofia G. (5 years old). Midway between a surprise and a pleasant confirmation – she is too smart to stop in front of something that could challenge her imagination – she chose to visit the not-so-easy show by Michael E. Smith (b. 1977, Detroit) at Zero with two amazing ‘nannies’ Emanuela Torri and Luisa Lanza – both part of the fresh and ingenious DOREMILAB’s project: L’arte raccontata dai bambini (art told by children) – and gives us her impressions.

Looking at the images on the galleries’ website Sofia opted for something that would stir her curiosity: “there is any canvas that means that I will do a treasure hunt (…). If the painter paints canvases, M.S. is an artist who makes objects, and these objects are neither old nor new, because if they were old somebody would have thrown them away, and if they were new, they wouldn’t be here.”

The exhibition path starts with Pillowcase (Untitled, 2012): “somebody must have forgot his/her blue blanket here; night is cold…” My mind goes to the artist’s research connected to the rests of a wasteful culture – our one – and his ability to make use of useless things to give them a new life. I’m reflecting upon Smith’s radical re-thinking of objects, a manipulation and a re-allocation that give them new structures and functions.

Another sculpture caught Sofia’s attention, it has to do with an orange metal cylinder with an antenna and a blue cap overboard; it is part of the previous work: “there is an umbrella stand but it is too high, it is not for children. The cap got jammed into an umbrella stick. Maybe the wind tore it. I wonder whose cap is that? The artist must love blue.”


The visit goes on. A piece of red varnished metal on the windowsill with a framed see-through image hanging on the close window moves Sofia’s view: “there is a piece of a drying rack; it looks like an open fence, and above it, there is the picture of the ghosts; M.S. must have hung it there to see the ghosts, it looks like those papers you find in hospital to see if you have broken your bones.”

The works by Michael E. Smith are not figurative, nevertheless his creations – also thanks to his capacity of playing with materials – have such an evocative power, which gives to things new identifiable meanings albeit suggesting the sense of their temporarity and abandonment. “M.S. left a small potato stuck on the wall with a nail, which remains the same while the potato has grown. Look at it sideways, it reminds me a pumpkin or, maybe a pate… “

Curiosity is ruling the roost and replaces superstructures I usually turn to while reviewing an art show. Untitled, 2012 (shell, hat) “could be a mouth with the hat, both the objects have a hole” – they are disposed in the same way in a united pile – “and could be put on one’s head, they have the same folds.”

The installation in two parts made of an altered fridge door, a painting (wood and fabric) and a hinge “is a kind of springboard without water, like a skateboard jump,” while always according to Sofia’s free imaginative flow, coming out the ‘shell room’ and looking onto toward the ceiling “there are two shower tubes: one with a jug from which it could drop soil and the other one, with a microphone from which electricity could be sourced from. Soil + electric current = earthquake.”

The exhibition path is almost ended. A “tool with a fish face and a nest head, which would be turned into a lamp, putting a light bulb in it” (Untitled, 2012 – stuffed catfish, milling machine), and a “lengthen ball” – made of urethane foam and rubber – “able to move in circle and chose who will be its shooter.”

“I think that this show could be good both for boys and girls, but not younger than me.”

Monica Lombardi & Sofia G. – Many thanks to Doremilab’s staff and Gallery Zero, Courtesy the artist and Zero, Photo: © Filippo Armellin

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15/10/2012

‘Returning’ Memories Through Painting

‘Returning’ Memories Through Painting

We have no hesitation in saying that the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958 Mortsel) is one of the centerpieces of painting today – maybe we would say one of the few ones left –, able to carve out a place of honor in the contemporary art world even if using a ‘traditional’ and for many old-fashioned media. Perhaps in a time of spectacular, huge or site-specific installations where the watchword seems to be more than ever amazing and capturing attention at once, being shaken by a canvas and feeling controversial emotions while looking at it may sound very strange. But it still can happen, and it happened to us with Tuymans’ narrations.


Mr. Tuymans looks like a man with a sterling character, and when observing his works, the first thing that comes to one’s mind is that he is not a joyful and merely visual artist. Going a bit more into his painterly world, this approach leaps out at you, plumbing the diverse and significant historical topics chosen by the artist during is career: the Holocaust, returned through the representation of a gas chamber or the Nazi entourages; the post-9/11 period, which includes the TV-sized close-up of Condoleezza Rice, The Secretary of State; the Belgium’s colonial history and its relationship with Africa that lead to his unmistakable portrait of Patrice Lumumba; the religion iconography, or the puzzling Disney Eden, which mixes up an outward innocence and a weird, somehow terrifying implication. Power in its different forms and manifestation, often stripped of cultural superstructures, plays a key role in Tuymans’ works, which reveal their complexity along with their intimacy and vulnerability though exercising a symptomatic view.


Once again, the theme of accessing the world through the lens of a camera comes back. Using photography and film/television/internet stills as memory traces and starting points, Luc Tuymans tells blurred, fragmented histories that have to be reconstructed through clues depicted with a palette of unsaturated and delicate colours and thin, mainly horizontal brushstrokes. There is no will of drawing inferences, rather creating observations of observations of the reality.

If you want to know more about the Belgian Artist, a new series of works is currently on view at David Zwirner Gallery that inaugurated its first European location in London with the show entitled Allo! at the beginning of October. The exhibition – presenting a suite of new paintings characterized by atypical bright chromatism, dark backgrounds and an exotic atmosphere inspired by the final scene of the movie The Moon and Sixpence – will run until November 17th.



Monica Lombardi – Many thanks to David Zwirner Gallery

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08/10/2012

Curtis Mann: Medium and Materiality

Curtis Mann: Medium and Materiality

The title of Curtis Mann’s first show at Monica De Cardenas Gallery, Medium and Materiality, immediately introduces us to the core of his artistic research.

Curtis Mann (Born in 1979 in Dayton, Ohio, lives and works in Chicago, where he also teaches photography at Columbia College) displays a new body of unusual photographic works: partially modified images, slightly manipulated with Photoshop, or erased by means of a technical process developed by the artist by painting on portions of enlarged color photographs with a clear varnish, and then bleaching away unprotected portions with the result of an abstract image with some recognizable areas. While his early works are composed by found images taken from different sources, showing current affairs (namely, violent conflicts abroad) or images taken from appropriated snapshots, travel photographs, and casual documentations, this time Curtis Mann seems to be more focused on patterns and geometrical compositions such as grids or minimal images, like empty spaces and solitary traces in vanishing landscapes.

In works like Object A or Ouroboros the viewer could get the sensation of being in front of an image of Mars, or some scientific or geological picture of a landscape. Due to the particular artistic process adopted by the artist, the original photographic image results transfigurated, leaving the viewer in front of a variety of possible interpretations.

To understand deeply the final result of this intense process of transformation, the viewer should get closer to the works and look how the photographic paper becomes dense and materic: certain parts of the image are reinforced while others are partially concealed or disappear completely. But unlike in digital manipulation, in this case the physical procedure that leads to the final result is clearly visible. This long artistic procedure, far away from the quick photographic “click” seems to drift outside of time, going inside the photographic image, prying into the innermost character of the medium.


In some of these more recent works, like Rock Collection, the action of the medium is reached through the direct manipulation of the photographic surface, introducing a more sculptural and three-dimensional effect, achieved by folding, cutting or overlapping different portions of pictures with some reference back to the tradition of old American masters thus Gordon Matta-Clark, and maybe to other less-known artists, photographers and experimental filmmakers, who started during the sixties to expand media like photograpy, cinema and painting.

Between bi-dimensional image and object, photography and painting, real and fiction, this is Mann’s first Italian exhibition, programmed simultaneously in two different spaces: Monica De Cardenas Gallery (Milano) and Luce Gallery (Turin).


Riccardo Conti – Images courtesy of Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Exhibition pictures by Andrea Rossetti.

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01/10/2012

Chloé’s Kaleidoscopic Attitudes

Chloé’s Kaleidoscopic Attitudes

To celebrate its 60th birthday, La Maison Chloé presents an exhibition retracing the history of its passions. Chloé Attitudes is a path through memories, insights and inspirations of a brand able to give birth to iconic and influential styles. The show, which is now on view at the amazing space of Palais de Tokyo, features archive objects, never-published shots and drawings by renowned artists, along with sketches of selected pieces by Chloé’s creative roster, the nine top designers who glamorized the brand years by years: from the founder Gaby Aghion, through Gérard Pipart, Maxime de La Falaise, Karl Lagerfeld, Martine Sitbon, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, Hannah MacGibbon, to the present Clare Waight Keller.



To accompany the tracking of attitudes displayed by the fashion house, 2DM’s talent Carolina Melis – an Italian illustrator and art director, based in London and with an international professional background that led her to invent moving pictures for major clients such as Prada, Vogue Japan, Sony, Barclays (just to mention a few) – was commissioned to design and direct an original animation spotlighting the unique colours and textiles, which have always characterize lady Chloé. To do this, once again, Carolina turned to a charming and hypnotic tool: the Kaleidoscope that gives theme and title to the film. Images that remind magnetic mandala, rotating geometric figures and coloured patterns pinpointing beautiful symmetric compositions – virtually – made of embroideries, crêpe de chine, cotton popeline, chiffon floating to the tune of Colleen’s sound track creating multiple reflections.

As a gift for all vintage lovers, the Maison will re-edit some emblematic items, which will be available in Chloé boutiques from February 2013. Among the artists who interpreted the key moments of Chloé’s flair we are proud to count Sandra Suy with her romantic and alluring illustrations such as the Top Ananas by Stella McCartney, the Violin by Karl Lagerfeld, or the virginal A-line blouse by Phoebe Philo.

Chloé Attitudes will run until 18th November 2012 at Palais de Tokyo, 13 av du Président Wilson, 16th. M° Iéna. If you turn up there, don’t miss it!

Monica Lombardi – Illustrations Carolina Melis & Sandra Suy

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01/10/2012

Little Red Riding Hood Is The Wolf

Little Red Riding Hood Is The Wolf

Kiki Smith (German-born in 1954, but a long-time New Yorker) has been investigating the relation between space and human bodies, psychology shaped by instincts and fantasies since 90’s.

The works by Smith – mainly sculptures and drawings on paper with a sharp and direct mark – reflect her introspective and intimate concept of art, somehow seen as a post-traumatic experience and lived as a sort of exorcism. Showing female images – sometimes stained with blood, laid down on the floor, in a mystic ecstasy, or crawling and losing their entrails – the artist recalls mother and childish figures immersed in dreamlike atmospheres like fairytale characters, but not necessarily “positive”.


With evocative poetry, which gathers together ancestral and esoteric symbols: mythological creatures, owls and fawns that bring to mind the eternal interchange between brightness and darkness as in Persephone’s rise and descent from and to Hades, Kiki Smith shows the perishability of human bodies and their vulnerability. Using wax, chalk, china, bronze and dropping them on organs such as hearts, wombs, pelvises, and ribs, the artist seems to play an archaic and, at the same time, erotic and twisted ritual, expressing a strong and primary aptitude, which tends toward death. Fighting against patriarchy is a key factor that always rules her works, but while for Louise Bourgeois (25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010) this approach was focused on men’s destruction, Smith moves her attention to women’s diverse forms of mourning.


In By the Stream at Raffaella Cortese Gallery, the artist makes use of photography as a mean to retrace her hold dear subjects and imaginative worlds; once again living beings have been thrown into the nature of fabulous and timeless scenarios. Shooting details of her creations, Smith opens the door to numerous interpretations: a red cap hides one’s face, is this the image of a woman who fights the wolf, succumbs to it, or learns to live in symbiosis with it and, more in general, with the mother earth? She could be fragile, scared and abused, but also well aware of her nature, able to move between objective and unconscious reality, embodying the maiden, the mother and/or the Mistress of animals as an evolved archetype: a sort of contemporary Hecate.

Kiki Smith’s exhibition will run until 15th November 2012 along with the solo show by the Czech photographer Jitka Hanzlovà, hosted in the second space of the gallery.

Monica Lombardi – Many thanks to Raffaella Cortese Gallery.

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28/09/2012

A Pie in the Sky

A Pie in the Sky

The renowned Treviso Comic Book Festival is coming to its end, after a full program of initiatives, involving the very best of the cartoonists and illustrators, coming from all over the world to liven up the city. 
XYZ will close this tracking of exhibitions, workshops and talks with a group show by the illustrators Eleonora Marton and the 2DM’s talented Elena Xausa.

For A Pie in the Sky the space of the experimental gallery will be split in two, half part hosting fanzines and drawings on paper made by the former freelance artist, while the other one is devoted to 7 screen-printings by Xausa, limited editions with a circulation of 25 pieces each. Both the illustrators will present a bunch of works expressing their personal vision of everyday life’s source of inspirations: music and street culture communicated through a childlike and direct mark, with a cheerful, but never trivial approach. For all collectors and illustrator lovers, but also simply for those who want to take a piece of the show home, we remind you that Eleonora Marton’s fanzines and Elena Xausa’s screen-printing editions will be available to purchase directly at XYZ.

Floating faces eating LPs or animated smiling lifebuoys, sketches and wordplays will be on view and on sale at via Inferiore, 31, starting from Sunday 30th at 6pm with a Dj set/aperitif by King Of Bingo. The show will run until 7th OCtober.

Monica Lombardi

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24/09/2012

Mind-To-Hand Flow by Dan Perjovschi

Mind-To-Hand Flow by Dan Perjovschi

Drawing could be an uncurbed instinct. For Dan Perjovschi (b. 1961, Romania), grown up in the paranoid/nationalistic vision of art imposed by the Romanian communist regime, drawing represents the most effective and direct way to express himself freely. Soon after the fall of Ceausescu’s autocracy, in the early 90’s, Perjovschi started his collaboration as illustrator with an independent, socio/political weekly magazine named Revista 22 – where 22 stands for 22nd December 1989, the day of the regime fall –, which first gave him the opportunity to let his creative and critical process flows. Through simple, childlike, “cartoonish” images, speech bubbles, and wordplays, Perjovschi communicates his unique analysis of the present social issues, mixing up frivolity and sharpness, irony and seriousness.

Moving from paper to wall as different supports for his works, the artist exploits the directness of the graffito and its performative nature combining them with the meditation of a previous observation: going around to collect ideas, equipped only with sketchbooks and marker pens, he takes notes of the surrounding world and translates his thoughts about the intricate situations of everyday life. Doing this, he creates works that can be called literary graffiti, which are little poems or conceptual statements made not only for the sake of leaving a mark, but also for making you think.


When entering the solo show by Dan Perjovschi entitled Good news, bad news, no news at Kaufmann Repetto in Milano, the impact is certainly strong. All the walls of the gallery are covered with Italian and international newspapers, reporting news about politics, economy, culture, but also rumours and plain gossip overlapped by the artist’s sketches and writings: a Don Quixote on his horse saying “I’m back!”, the texts “Nobody reads yesterday’s newspapers”, “Tragedies have no nationality” on the beige pages of the Guardian and the Observer, or the orange ones of the Financial times and Il Sole 24 Ore, along with the funny sentence “Men love Pink” on the unmistakable pink pages of the Italian sport newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport, just to mention a few.

Through these huge site-specific installations Perjovschi made a portrait of our society in all its complexity. But the visit is not finished yet. A marvellous music comes from downstairs becoming – maybe accidentally – part of the main show. It comes from the project room and tickles your fancy; it is the last movement of the 9th symphony by Beethoven Ode an die Freude (Ode to Joy), which was adapted for use as the European Anthem and gives the title to the show. Going down the stairs, you see a sort of goal posts where the young artist Fausto Falchi (b.1982, Naples) hung the European flag just over an experimental Ruben’s tube that causes the changing of the flame according to the melody. The atmosphere of the room is warm and touching even if the scene is dramatic and full of meaning. Even though the flag – and everything it represents – is hardwearing, it is constantly in jeopardy because of the fire, which puts it in a dangerous and unstable position. As never before, it is so easy for us to feel this heat.


Good news, bad news, no news by Dan Perjovschi and Ode an die Freude by Fausto Falchi will run until November 2012.

Monica Lombardi – Many thanks to Kaufmann Repetto gallery staff.

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