In his many films, Roman Signer most often appears paused, silent, while painstakingly waiting for something to happen (more often than not, an explosion). Perhaps these suspensive experiences stood him in good stead during the four-decade-long wait for his first solo show in an Italian museum – this despite the influential Swiss artist having lived just 200 km north of the Italian border for most of his life. ‘Roman Signer: Films and Installations’ occupies the uppermost floor of the Museo d’arte dell Provincia di Nuoro in Sardinia.

While ascending the three flights of stairs leading up to the gallery, visitors are met by umbrellas hanging from the ceiling (Ombrelli, Umbrellas, 2016). This is the first of the five new works produced by Signer for the exhibition. Another, a video shot on a solitary Sardinian beach (Due ombrelli, Two Umbrellas, 2016), features two umbrellas pitched in the sand, resisting the pull of waves until first one then the other gives in, falling and rolling into the water. Both as sculptural objects and performers without agency, umbrellas distil Signer’s entire practice, embodying the clash of bittersweet melancholy and Chaplinesque humour. Over the years, he has tested umbrellas – and other everyday objects such as tables, chairs, boxes or briefcases – in every possible way, subjecting them to the unpredictable effects of combustion, abrasion or surges of water.

The display of Signer’s entire catalogue of Super 8 films capturing these quasi-scientific experiments – a collection of 205 works from 1975 to 1989, now digitally converted – is the mesmerizing and immersive highpoint of the exhibition: a forest of tripods and video players, each projected onto the walls at a size of 30–40 cm wide and roughly at visitor’s eye level. In one film, Signer is pictured throwing a wooden box from a great height into a rushing river (Fallende Kiste, Falling Box, 1980); another shows him sitting on a ladder lifted into the air by two balloons inflated by the combustion inside two oil barrels (Zwei Fässer, Two Barrels, 1988). Then there is, of course, his iconic Einbruch im Eis (Breaking into the Ice, 1985), in which the artist walks out onto a frozen lake until the ice breaks and he falls into the gelid water, turning towards the camera as it zooms in on his terrified face.

According to Lorenzo Giusti (cocurator of the show with Li Zhenhua), it would take about four hours in total to watch all the works on display. As the viewer’s eyes surf along the walls, waves of visual stimuli come from every direction: objects spin, fuses burn, volcanoes erupt. Signer is often present in these films, at times as a witness, more frequently as instigator of his cheerfully goofy, blatantly handmade, possibly dangerous experiments. The repeated use of his own body aligns the uncontainable forces of chance with human craftsmanship, but also a comforting sense of intimacy. As the decades have passed, Signer has slowly disappeared from the stage, instead casting objects on a human scale, like boots or hats, that take his place in front of the camera. This move towards tropes of absence is particularly clear with Un passo verso il mare (A Step Towards the Sea, 2016): a pair of empty shoes on the seashore with a long cord of fuse attached – suddenly the fuse is lit and the flames fly along its length, until fire engulfs the shoes and brings the video to an end.

Two more site-specific works are on display: one is a wooden labyrinth in which only the heads of other visitors can be seen (Installazione, Installation, 2016); the other is a subtle intervention in which a pair of glasses on a table are illuminated by a beam of light coming from a Super 8 Projector (Occhiali, Glasses, 2016). The implication is that Signer may have just disappeared, as if he had held on to one of his many umbrellas, blown away by a whimsical wind: an impossible image that would nonetheless capture the balance of danger and freedom that Signer’s oeuvre has always so effortlessly articulated.

From: Frieze Magazine, Summer 2016

Descending the few steps that lead to the ‘In Residence’ basement space of Galleria Franco Noero, you might think you had walked into a construction site. The room smells of wet concrete, a concrete mixer is in the corner and wooden boards are leant up against the walls. In fact it’s all part of a new installation by Mike Nelson entitled ‘Procession, process. Progress, progression. Regression, recession. Recess, regress.’ Its centrepiece is a kind of ‘carpet’ made of concrete and steel, which the British artist has created by imprinting original timbers from wooden Ottoman-era buildings in Istanbul onto the wet concrete. The installation reprises a project Nelson developed in 2009 for the Akbank Cultural Centre in Istanbul, which in turn had been a preparatory work for a proposed, yet never realized piece destined for the 2003 Istanbul Biennial. Nelson’s original intention was to take a derelict Ottoman wooden building and use it to cast a brutalist concrete structure: a tribute to a putative form of ‘Kemalist modernism’. In the artist’s view, it’s astonishing that the political turning point marked by the end of the Ottoman Empire was not matched by a parallel shift in the country’s architecture. Nelson carried that narrative forward to 2011, when he famously turned the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale into a simulacrum of a 17th century Ottoman caravanserai.

Much has changed since the artist began this series of explorations into Turkish history. In 2003 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was elected Prime Minister for the first time and was then, in the eyes of EU leaders, a reliable moderate. Today, Western media coverage of Turkey mainly focuses on how the once Europe-facing, Western-dressing, liberal nation is slipping back towards religious conservatism. How Turkey is allegedly funding Daesh fighters, carrying out military operations against the outlawed Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), and taking heavy-handed action against members of the free press. In light of these stories, Nelson’s installation inevitably strikes one as a gloomy omen: the Ottoman timbers imprinted upon the concrete, testify to the impossibility of eradicating previous histories and forebode a return to 19th century pre-Atatürk traditions. On the day of my visit, Erdoğan announced that up to 6 million homes were to be demolished all over the country to make room for newly-built houses. In a speech he added, ‘We need to own this style, of which [the famous Ottoman architect] Sinan is the foremost practitioner. I want the mosques […] to reflect the Ottoman architecture not only with their appearance, but also with their souls.’

Throughout his career, Nelson has often returned to previously worked narratives and installations. Maybe this time he deliberately sought to dig deeper into Turkey’s current state of affairs; or maybe he just wanted to confront the viewer with a feeling of displacement. What is certain is that despite palpable similarities, the 2009 installation and this one are two very different pieces. In the catalogue accompanying Nelson’s 2011 British Pavilion, Dan Cameron insisted that ‘above all else, [the caravanserai built into the pavilion] is most categorically not the artist’s reconstruction of a place that existed before in another time and location.’ The same rule may apply here: by re-imprinting the planks onto cement, Nelson is not merely echoing his original gesture but is adding yet another reflection to an ongoing mise en abîme. The artist doesn’t seem to be interested in merely travelling back in time but rather in discovering means of accessing parallel realities. Upon leaving the ‘In Residence’ space at Galleria Franco Noero, one is left with the impression of having visited a place where the past, the present and the future have been combined, as if they were the cement, gravel and water in that concrete mixer in the corner.

From: Frieze Magazine, Summer 2016

Flicking through an abandoned magazine in an airport last week, I stumbled across an article dissecting the peculiar strain of madness thought to run through David Bowie’s family. It featured a black-and-white photograph of Bowie himself—who died of cancer in January—when he was seven. This young David is slightly turned toward the camera in an asymmetric pose, pulling a smile upstaged by his signature magnetic, almost eerie (if not alienish already) eyes. It’s the face of a precocious kid from a middle-class family, and yet, it is quite possible to catch a prophetic glimpse of the person who’s going to change the face of pop culture forever (and who will nurse the cultural literacy of generations of singers, artists, and writers, myself included).

The article fresh in my mind, a few days later I found myself in Hong Kong for the opening of Massimo De Carlo’s first Asian space—his third venue after Milan in 1987 and London in 2009—where he presented a solo show by the Chinese-born, France-based artist Yan Pei-Ming, It Takes a Lifetime to Become Young. The exhibition featured a new body of work in which the artist’s signature fast-stroke paintings depict a selection of artists who inspired him, portrayed in the early years of their lives. There’s Lucian Freud as a schoolboy in shorts, smiling with a schoolbag on his shoulders; a barefooted five-year-old Jackson Pollock feeding ducks and hens; and an ethereal baby Frida Kahlo in a slouched sitting position. The contrast between the reverse–crystal ball effect of the magazine image of the young Bowie (in which one could all too easily project the familiar representation of the future icon onto the look of his younger self) and Ming’s paintings (where faces are—as is everything else on the painterly surface—in constant agitation, animated by muscular and thick brushstrokes) was stark. In Ming’s new works it can actually be hard to tell who’s who without a caption list: the images of the master painters in their boyhood are fuzzy and ambiguous, eerily nonspecific. Quite a change compared to many of Yan Pei-Ming’s other portraits, where the subjects are often faces we know all too well: Mao Zedong when chairman of the People’s Republic of China, Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II, George Washington on the $1 bill. The Chinese painter is known for addressing the power of the image through household images of power.

While several of his previous works employed repetition or juxtaposition (like US President Obama’s portrait rubbing against that of defeated presidential contender John McCain) to challenge conventionally accepted identities, this new series strips authoritative, influential figures, such as Pablo Picasso or Willem de Kooning, of their authority and weight, rendering them fleeting, vulnerable—undone. Furthermore, by revealing historical figures in their previous, undetermined childlike state, Yan Pei-Ming manages to make them human again. Take for example the installation of four medium-size paintings depicting Andy Warhol at different ages in passport photo style: there’s a baby Warhol in a gray palette; a slightly older boy, probably around five, in rusty pink; a more colorful and nuanced portrait of the artist at about ten; and finally an all-blue version of Warhol as an average-looking teen. Seen together, the pieces possess a melancholy, candid, soulful, and somewhat playful edge: it’s a Bildungsroman in painting form. One is left wondering whether Yan Pei-Ming aimed at out-WarholingWarhol by this comprehensive stripping of the individual greatness from a famous individual by making their image universal, or whether the artist rather wished to celebrate the genuineness, the authenticity, the truthfulness of those who inspired him and his practice.

The question is further complicated by the inclusion in the exhibition of a self-portrait depicting Yan Pei-Ming as he is today. Whether it is an improbable self-elevation to power or an exercise in humility (him as an infant compared to master painters) is hard to tell, and perhaps the answer will be revealed by the direction in which his incessantly researched painting further evolves. The fact that he’s slowly abandoning his signature monochrome palette in favor of an array of different and vibrant tints and shades signals a shift that will be interesting to see unfold.

Likewise, Massimo De Carlo’s new venture in China feels like a moment of change worth watching. The Italian gallery has been exploring the Asian markets for years and is keen to play a greater role in the development of the region’s contemporary art scene. Many have pointed out that its timing might not be the best, as China is experiencing a marked economic slowdown, yet De Carlo is quick to remind his critics that he successfully opened his first international branch in London just few months after the financial meltdown of 2008, and has managed to stay in the black ever since. Apparently, as David Bowie would have put it, “changes are taking the pace [De Carlo’s] going through.”

From: Mousse Magazine #53, April 2016

Museion inaugurates its 2016 programme with a two-part exhibition on and around the work of Francesco Vezzoli entitled ‘Museo / Museion’. On the first three floors of the museum, the artist has re-imagined and re-arranged the collection, while on the fourth, Letizia Ragaglia, the museum’s director, has curated the first retrospective of Vezzoli’s sculptural work. A classical aesthetic as well as contemporary iconicity have been the two predominant, intertwined themes and tropes of the artist’s recent work, but here the emphasis is more on antiquity than on contemporaneity. The show begins in the foyer, with wallpaper based on a Giovanni Paolo Panini painting transforming the space into an 18th-century salon, continues upstairs where the artist has (literally and conceptually) re-framed contemporary works from Museion’s collection, and reaches its climax in the upper gallery with a series of classical statues re-engineered by the artist. (For example, a 170 CE marble sculpture of a woman’s head is updated with a glossy painted finish.)

Exhibitions combining classical and contemporary artworks are having a moment in Italy: from ‘Serial Classic’ at Fondazione Prada, Milan, last summer, which displayed Roman antiquities to explore notions of original and imitation, to ‘Jeff Koons in Florence’ at the city’s Palazzio Vecchio, which juxtaposed two of Koons’ sculptures with works by Donatello and Michelangelo. But how much agency does art from the Classical period really have in contemporary art? How much critical or even political potential can be leveraged? Vezzoli is almost religiously mute when it comes to these questions. During the press preview for ‘Museo / Museion’, he insisted on calling his curatorial approach ‘a non-antagonistic provocation’, ‘the opposite of institutional critique’. Instead he is playing ‘a serious game’. Indeed, Vezzoli’s curated show is often jocular. Take Mario Schifano’s Casa sola (1988/89), which is clumsily nestled in a trompe l’œil rendition of the thick wooden frame of Sandro Botticelli’s Annunciation (1489); or Nan Goldin’s Gina at Bruce’s Dinner Party, NYC (1991), which is framed by an exact replica of the frame that holds Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome Writing (c.1605-06). It is up to the viewer to rationalize these associations, with the assistance of a number of well-designed handouts.

It is in the survey of Vezzoli’s sculptural work on the fourth floor that the political implications become more apparent. Over the past five years, the artist has acquired several antique statues at auctions. Some of these have been restored to their original states, while others been paired with new creations, becoming a part of the artist’s work: a beautiful 19th century red porphyry head sits face to face with a white marble self-portrait by Vezzoli (Satire of a Satyr, 2011); twelve tiny archeological artifacts are topped with handmade cotton hats (Styling the past, 2014); a torso of a 2nd-century CE marble statue stands with a Brancusi bronze head in place of its natural crowning piece (Exotic & Erotic (after Constantin Brancusi), 2015). Museion presents these sculptural and historical pastiches by Vezzoli as derivative of the artist’s established tendency to undermine ingrained value systems: ‘Vezzoli the anarchic’, the press release calls him. But, rather than a call for the disintegration of the status quo, some of his sculptures seem – on the contrary – to almost favour a return to a status quo ante.

The artist’s series ‘True Colors’ (2014), for example, is a tangible demonstration of how Vezzoli’s journey into the foundations of classicism has turned from sacrilegious to rigorous. In consultation with art historians and archaeologists, he restored the painted faces of several marble busts dating to the 1st-century CE, challenging the common perception of Greco-Roman statues as forms void of any original colouring. During a TEDx Talk last year, Vezzoli said: ‘We have inherited a watered-down, cleaned-up version of the past […] When I approach an ancient sculpture and colour its skin or eyes, I restore its capability of being a vehicle of desire’. In these times of feverish debate about what may or may not constitute the foundations of Europe’s common cultural heritage, to speak of historical truth and to question some of the lies we have based our understanding of the past on is a well-timed endeavour, and in that sense has a clear political charge, whether Vezzoli likes to admit it or not.

From: Frieze Magazine, February 2016

Diving into the turbulent depths of legacy and memory, “Space Shuttle in the Garden”—Petrit Halilaj’s first solo exhibition in Italy—is a noteworthy exploration of resurfacing national and personal trauma, and a vivid investigation of the potential for artistic storytelling to mend political, social, and familial rifts. At the core of the show—in both conceptual and physical terms—is a house, or at least the skeleton of a house: a three-dimensional wooden blueprint originally erected by Halilaj’s parents as part of the process of rebuilding their home, which was leveled during the Kosovo war of 1998-99 (the old house originally stood on a hill near Kostërrc; the new building is in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital). The structure was first exhibited at the 6th Berlin Biennale in 2010, where it served as a powerful metaphor for the artist’s own history of migration; after the war in Kosovo, Halilaj studied in Milan and now divides his life between three places (Berlin, Pristina and Bozzolo, near Mantua, in Italy). Reconfigured to fit into Pirelli HangarBicocca, the installation twists its way into the metal and concrete structure of the “Shed” gallery like ivy crawling up a trellis, and serves as both the framework and backdrop not only to the past of the artist’s family but also for his recent works. Walking in and around this not-quite-house, one can see a dozen other works by Halilaj through the hollow walls, and although many of these works have been previously exhibited, their readaptation and recontextualization lends a fresh perspective.

Viewing this exhibition is a little like stepping into a View-Master filled with images from the artist’s childhood, but altered, enlarged, and distorted by time and by the prism of personal recollection. The pieces are varied, but unified by a thread of memory: there are oversized reconstructions of the jewelry that his mother buried during the war, crafted with pigments and debris from the ruins of their first house in Kostërrc; a series of several clay and brass objects modeled in the form of ocarinas found in the archeological site of Runik (not far from where the artist’s family lived); there’s a piece called 26 Objekte n’ Kumpir, from 2009, consisting in a structure of branches and earth that hides replicas of objects handmade by Halilaj’s paternal grandfather; and his signature piece They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens II, also from 2009, which is a rudimentary wooden space rocket (erected by friends and family using the same materials employed to build his family home) that shelters a number of living hens. Nearby is Cleopatra, a light sculpture that twirls randomly, simulating the spiraling movements of the butterflies Halilaj used to chase across fields of flowers in his childhood and, on the other side of the room, there’s a sublime video (Who does the earth belong to while painting the wind?!, 2012) showing the artist as an adult, chasing the butterflies descended from those of his memory, on that same hill where his family house once stood and where today, years later, we see that nature has taken the upper hand.

At first sight, the exhibition may appear purely a meditation on forced displacement and longing, a tale of absences and impossible returns. But there are nuances to be observed. Those themes, as well as the recurrent reference to a childhood spent in a house on a hill, call to mind the works of an author whose entire oeuvre revolves around the trope of an eternal return to a collina-mammella, or hill-breast: Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), one of Italy’s most prominent twentieth-century poets and authors. Take, for example, this quote from Pavese’s The Devil in the Hills (1949), as voiced by the first-person narrator while standing in front of the house of his childhood friend, Oreste: “I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else’s understanding.” I wonder if there’s a more perfect caption for Halilaj’s moveable home. Both the Italian author and the Kosovar artist imbued the realism of their respective narratives with clear elements of symbolism, and they both appear to believe that every person lives out a destiny preordained by personal, mythic, childhood experiences. Nonetheless, there’s a key difference in their respective credo: the protagonists of most of Pavese’s novels are moved by a desire to regain a rooted psychic identity (in the wake of the Italian Civil War of 1943-45), but are forced to confront the impossibility of this task in the face of returning to their home ground—finding their houses as they left them, but realizing their inability to ever be home. When Halilaj’s parents went back to their hill after their war, their home was burned to the ground; so they rebuilt their house, years later and in another place. Now their son travels around Europe with its shell.

If, in Pavese, the past is a vivid but unapproachable presence, haunting the present like a ghost, then in Halilaj the absence (or rather, the physical disappearance) of a tangible past creates the space for reconstruction: new buildings, new interpretations, new meanings. For the artist, the past is not an unreachable spirit but rather a homemade present: there’s no room for longing, the memories are lived in the now. One of the many merits of this intelligently-orchestrated exhibition—Roberta Tenconi’s first endeavor as Curator at HangarBiccoca—is that it captures these feelings and interweaves these tropes within a cohesive narrative. If one has to find a weakness in it, is it probably that with a past that is so present there’s little room for the future. Since Halilaj has yet to turn 30 and his practice is less than ten years old, inviting him to do a solo show at Pirelli HangarBicocca is a bold and praiseworthy move. On the other hand, the quasi-retrospective gaze of his works leaves one wondering if this exhibition hasn’t missed the opportunity to look not only at where Halilaj comes from, but also at where he is heading.

From: Mousse Magazine #52, January 2016

Originally published on: Lorenzo Benedetti, Eva Fabbris, Letizia Ragaglia, Nicola Ricciardi, Marco Scotini, Here, Now and Elsewhere: Site-Specific and Thereabouts (Milan: Mousse Publishing / La Triennale, 2015), 20–38.

Over the past twenty years, public art has increasingly distanced itself from the heroic and masculine vision of the so-called Plop Art[1], deliberately moving towards a much more anti-monumental and anti-decorative dimension. Authoritarian and autonomous sculptural gestures have been replaced by social practices, by projects based on direct exchanges with the citizens, by artworks integrated into the urban environment. The site has become increasingly more specific. In Italy, this new[2] approach is embodied by one artist in particular, Alberto Garutti, whose intense research activities—materializing over the years in numerous, permanent interventions in cities and museums—is primarily based on the dialogue between the (public and private) space and the people inhabiting and living it. His works often originate within existing communities – but are likely to create new ones. This approach has been clear since the first and less explicitly “public” works by the artist—such as Orizzonti (Horizons) (1987-2015), a series of panes of glass, of different formats and sizes, half in white, half in black.They represent the symbolic axes of all Garutti’s professional and affective relationships: each individual work represents a line and it exists in virtue of the relationship with a patron or a collector (whose name is given to the work). Each time that the artist makes a new Orizzonte, it is as if the line leaves his studio, becoming public by entering into the collectors’ houses and connecting with the others to construct the ideal horizon of his life and career. From this symbolic gesture onwards, Garutti’s work has been constantly crossed by lines: [3] some coiled up, like the kilometers of nylon thread of the Matasse (Bundles) (1997-2002), others merely hypothetical, like the kilometers on foot of Tutti i passi che ho fatto nella mia vita mi hanno portato qui, ora (All the steps I have taken in my life have led me here, now) (2007-2015). His most recent work—to which this piece is dedicated—also originated with a line: the twisted neon scribble made by Lucio Fontana in 1951 on the occasion of the IX Milan Triennale.[4] Garutti’s work is one of the four site-specific interventions that are part of “Ennesima. Una mostra di sette mostre sull’arte italiana” (Ennesima. An Exhibition of Seven Exhibitions on Italian Art) and consists of a re-elaboration of the project Temporali (Storms) (2009-2015) [5], meant to be placed in the same space in which Fontana’s was situated. As often happens with Garutti’s works, the most accurate description is to be found in a caption: “In La Triennale’s main staircase and in the anteroom to the entrance to ‘Ennesima’ the lights vibrate when a lightning bolt falls in Italy during a storm. This work is dedicated to all those who, when passing by, think of the sky.” The installation is composed of a series of halogen lamps that light up (first burning with greater intensity and then gently dimming down again) whenever a lightening strikes somewhere in the Italian peninsula. To make the work the artist has relied on the consulting of CESI—Centro Elettrotecnico Sperimentale Italiano (Italian Center for Electrotechnical Experimentation)—, whose sensors detect all the lightning bolts that strike the national territory. It is the first time that, for this type of intervention, Garutti works on the lighting systems already present in the museum, thereby entering even more closely into a relationship with the architectural space. Furthermore, the new strip of light enters into an imaginary corridor that crosses the whole of Italy and unites various institutions in Rome, Turin[6] and Milan—ultimately projecting itself towards other possible contexts, towards other cities. That is, another line, amongst Garutti’s many lines. This short text traces yet some more, all hopefully useful in providing a framework for the artist’s latest endeavor. As a matter of fact, in order to construct a perspective, you always start by drawing some lines on a piece of paper.

Horizon line: from the Mediterranean to Texas

8838 kilometers divide La Triennale building from the centre of Austin, Texas. This figure has an exclusively statistical purpose (which Garutti would approve of) since what is of interest, in this case, is not the straight line of distance, or the two destinations, but the idea that this distance evokes in relation to a small but valuable little history of art that the artist himself recently told me:

“Our civilization was created smack in the middle of the Mediterranean, isolated on this extended peninsula along what was the highway of the times. Everyone passed along this stretch of sea, from the Turks to the Spaniards. The Medieval cities were created in an attempt to stem this continuous flow: they have a defensive heart, they are made of walls. And it was precisely as a consequence of these architectural conditions that art as we understand it today was born. It was the architecture of the time that invented painting, calling it up and saying: dear painting, come and break through these walls! And in order to respond to this request, painting took perspective with it. It is no coincidence that perspective drawing was born in Italy and not in Texas, where no walls existed.”

In this highly personalized synopsis of the invention of perspective—pronounced in front of a cup of coffee at La Triennale’s bar, one month before the inauguration of “Ennesima”—it can be assumed that the reference to Texas was purely casual. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note how, ironically enough, those days the American political debate was animated precisely by the possibility or not of building a wall along the borders of Texas, to mark out the dividing line between the United States and Mexico.[7] It is not hard to imagine that this hypothetical barrier would not please Garutti (rather the contrary: walls interest the artist for their implicit possibility of being crossed, of being made permeable by the actions of art). His dearest references are to the frescos by Giulio Romano in the Palazzo Te in Mantova,[8] or Andrea Pozzo’s Apotheosis of St. Ignatius.[9] Also, presumably, Piero della Francesca and the Legend of the True Cross (as Berenson says, “it is only in architecture that Piero displays lyrical feeling” [10]) or The Resurrection in Sansepolcro, where the relationship between art and architecture becomes even carnal (Longhi’s words come to mind when he talks about the “architectural grooves of Christ’s surroundings” [11]). These examples demonstrate to what degree visual art is a direct descendent of architecture­—at least for us, offspring of the Mediterranean. For Garutti, it has been like this since the beginning of time: “Where do you think that prehistoric men drew”, he asks me rhetorically, “if not in a primordial form of architecture such as the cave?” If art’s function is truly that of breaking down walls, it is, nonetheless, legitimate to ask oneself: what’s on the outside?

Land lines: from the museum to the city

“Is there still a city out there?”[12] Francesco Guccini asked himself at the dawn of the Nineties. Garutti would be asking himself a similar question just a few years later when breaking down the walls of an institution for the first time (not through painting like his highly illustrious predecessors—even if there is still something profoundly pictorial in his works). It was 1994; the year of his first public commission on the invitation of Antonella Soldaini for the exhibition “Arte a Peccioli” (Art in Peccioli). The work consisted of the philological reconstruction of a small theatre in the Tuscan town and—as a stone plaque still visible at the theatre’s entrance recites—it was “Dedicated to the boys and girls who fell in love in this small theatre”. The work was considered to be a manifesto of Garutti’s poetry and politics[13] and marked the start of a continuous dialogue with the populations of various cities: from Colle Val d’Elsa, where another important restructuring took place,[14] through to Bolzano where he created his seminal Piccolo Museion (Small Museion).[15] It was precisely during the inauguration of the latter that he recalled how “important the dimension of coming together is within the work of art, both in its most classic form (museum) and the contemporary form operating in the urban and social world (post-museum).” [16] It is worth noting how, even if on a more conceptual level, the work made for “Ennesima” also balances on the relationship between museum and post-museum: Temporali converses with the institution’s architecture but also with the city that hosts it. In talking to me about his work, Garutti used these words: “The intervention is synchronized with this box, this container of life and culture [La Triennale] and it then, in turn, radiates outwards, towards Milan. It’s as if, through Temporali, the architecture gains the capacity of becoming an urban sign.” A sign of light provided by the fusion of the atmospheric events and the workings of the light bulbs. When lightening falls on Milan, there is a direct connection: it is as if Fontana’s neon has been stretched to become a lead wire, stretching between the heart of the museum and the sky above it.

Vertical line: from the visitor to the sky

“We’ve all tried it once in our lives” Garutti confesses while we climb the La Triennale’s grand staircase, “to be lying on the ground looking at the sky and imagining there is no force of gravity: imagine how great it would be to fall upwards.” You can’t see the sky from where we’re standing in the musuem but, when Temporali will be working one would perceive it: it will be a bit closer. In the artist’s intentions the light vibrations metaphorically tear open the ceiling, establishing a close weave of correspondence between the spectator and the vault of the sky, between all of us and the enigma that hangs above our heads. It is no coincidence that Garutti has often tackled the subject of the sacred. It is sufficient to cite two examples that involve Christian iconography. The first work, as its very title implies, is Dedicata agli abitanti di Buonconvento e a tutti coloro che, anche da molto lontano, vorranno passare di qui solo con un pensiero (Dedicated to the inhabitants of Buonconvento and to all those who, even from very far away, wish to pass through here even just in their thoughts) (2005), and consists of a system of about one hundred light bulbs installed in the Chiesa SS. Pietro e Paolo in Buonconvento, in the province of Siena. Anyone can ask for a bulb to be turned on by calling a telephone number. The cost of the phone call is then donated for the construction of water purification plants in Sri Lanka. “I reflected on the latent need for spirituality that is already present in many collective forms”, the artist commented, “on the need for artistry and how cities without churches, mosques, synagogues and every other sort of sacred place are unthinkable.” The second work is entitled Madonna: it consists of a copy in white ceramic of a nineteenth century statue inside which passes an electrical element that keeps it at a temperature of 36.7 degrees centigrade, the temperature of the human body. The gesture of the worshipper who touches the statue of the Madonna is thus loaded with an experiential component, generating a virtual short circuit between the earth and the divine. Both works talk about the church as a vehicle for art. Garutti tackles the same question when talking to me about Temporali: “The Church has been the greatest commissioner in history, and the greatest imposer of limitations: you had to keep to the rules if you wanted to draw a cross, evangelical stories had to be painted in a particular way, etcetera… Italy produced very high quality art precisely because of these limitations: the great artists, when faced with such difficulties, had to find alternative roads and paths. Even the layman’s architecture of La Triennale is a limitation—but if there weren’t any limits there wouldn’t be any art.”

Temporal lines: from tomorrow to yesterday and back

It is no surprise that a person who has dedicated the greater part of his life to teaching[17] should return so often to the reenactment of the history of art—and Italian art history in particular. “Temporali is also a highly classical and pictorial work” Garutti tells me as we walked under the vaulted ceiling that would contain his work one month hence, “just as Ai Nati Oggi (To Those Born Today)[18], which tackled the most classical of themes, that of nativity. We cannot and must not free ourselves from the Classical: we live in a world where the present has never been so present but which, at the same time, contains all the past and all the future at one and the same time.” Possibly unwittingly, his words echo those of J. G. Ballard who had claimed at lenght, many years before, that the future does not exist. Back in 1974, in an interview with Carol Orr, the British writer stated: “The present is throwing up so many options, so many alternatives, that it contains the possibilities of any future right now. You can have tomorrow today.”[19] In a play of coincidences that would have pleased both Ballard and Garutti, the first work of art by the latter is also dated 1974 and its very title—Credo di ricordare (I think I remember)—demonstrates the importance of time and memory for him. The work consists of a series of black and white photographs that depict the body of the artist in his own room and in relation with the objects of his everyday use: a mattress on the floor, cigarettes, pillows, shoes—objects/subjects of a poetic dimension. A very private portrait but also the prelude to a vision of art that is profoundly public. There is no contradiction here—just the opposite. As perceptively observed by Paola Nicolin, the curator of the most complete monograph on Garutti’s work to date, “rereading more than thirty years of his work from a safe distance, it is evident that each piece of work was chemically constructed by means of a combining process so that each work is the child of the preceding one and contains within it the seed of the subsequent work which is still waiting to be formed.”[20] For example, there is evidently a link of intimacy in the connections of body and objects in Credo di ricordare and that of the, equally intimate, relationship between the inhabitants of the village of Trivero and their dogs, immortalized in one of Garutti’s sweetest and most delicate works: Il cane qui ritratto appartiene a una delle famiglie di Trivero. Quest’opera è dedicata a loro e alle persone che sedendosi qui ne parleranno, (The dog pictured belongs to a one of the families in Trivero. This work is dedicated to them and to the people who by sitting here will talk about them), 2009.[21]Paraphrasing the title of an essay by Letizia Ragaglia,[22] one would like to say that public art is no longer a hero on a horse but has become a dog on a bench—admittedly in cement but equipped with extreme lightness, suspended in the air by the infinite love of memory. “I hope and imagine that the dogs’ owners talk to each other” the artist explained at the time, “I hope that people’s stories will spread slowly through the area spontaneously, building a new landscape.” In other words, building a new Orizzonte. And here the circle closes, again because of a line. The game of drawing lines is potentially inexhaustible. What this text wanted to do was to set some up, drawn in free hand, to design a perspective projection that could be used as a framework for these new Temporali. But its aim was also that of demonstrating the heterogeneity of the lines that cross Garutti’s works: not exclusively horizontal lines—selective territorial figures, confines—nor purely vertical—barriers, forms of hierarchy—but a collection of parallel and tangential lines, of finite roads and infinite rails, all ordered according to an entropic logic that ensures that they don’t look like a grid but rather like the initial set up of a game of Shanghai—in which, given the artist’s nature, it is easy to imagine that we have all been invited to play.

[1] A pejorative slang term for public art. It refers to usually large, abstract, modernist or contemporary sculpture made for government or corporate plazas, spaces in front of office buildings, skyscraper atriums, parks, and other public venues. The term connotes that the work is unattractive or inappropriate to its surroundings – that is, it has been thoughtlessly “plopped” where it lies.

[2] Further reading on the subject: Alessandra Pioselli, L’arte nello spazio urbano:L’esperienza italiana dal 1968 a oggi, Johan & Levi Editore, 2015

[3] The artist himself has repeatedly stated that the line is important to him because “it contains the idea of design, and the design, as the first formalization of an idea, contains the idea of the project.” From an interview with Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, Flash Art 307 Dic-Gen 2013

[4]Lucio Fontana, Luce spaziale, 1951 [currently at Museo del Novecento, Milan].

[5]Initially presented in the former Church of Gianelline at the Fondazione Remotti in Camogli, near Genoa, the work has found its largest formalization to date at MAXXI in Rome as part of “Dialoghi con la città“ curated by Laura Cherubini

[6]After MAXXI, the work was subsequently installed at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, in the form of a chandelier made of over a thousand light bulbs.

[7] See the speech with which, in June 2015, the American tycoon Donald Trump announced

announced his candidacy for President of the United States in the 2016 election: “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I will make Mexico pay for that wall.”

[8] As Garutti said about the frescos during our brief meeting: “There is not a single centimeter that hasn’t been painted. Gelatin, water, and pigments: it’s a mix that undermines the static nature [of the building]. A terrific combination! ”

[9] “Where painting covers the architecture entirely, virtually denying its main feature: stability”[Ibid., Flash Art, # 307]

[10]Bernard Berenson, Piero della Francesca. O dell’arte non eloquente, Electa editrice, 1950

[11]Roberto Longhi, Breve ma veridica storia della pittura italiana, Sansoni, 1980

[12]Francesco Guccini, Canzone delle domande consuete, 1990

[13] For me, the priority was to make a work that would not be rejecting by the townspeople, a work with minimum environmental impact, that would shift the linguistic level to avoid populist demagogy. All this meant, as it does today, working on the method in a political way, rather than making a political work. In public projects I have glimpsed the danger of the self-referential nature of the art system. So I have understood that it was necessary to ‘go toward’… and, in the end, what is a work if not an encounter? To ‘go toward’ contains a political idea; and in this sense my work is political, precisely because it aims at establishing a plot of relationships with the city” [Achille Bonito Oliva, “Alberto Garutti”, in Enciclopedia della parola. Dialoghi d’artista. 1968-2008, Skira Editore, Milano, 2008

[14] That of Corale Vincenzo Bellini (2000), a sixteenth-century building, home to a choral group of the Tuscan town.

[15] A cubical pavilion in concrete and glass located in the area of the playground of the Don Bosco neighborhood in Bolzano. The structure is used to display, in a three-month cycle, one work from the collection of the Museion – Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bolzano – in a marginal context

[16] As Letizia Regaglia said: “There is therefore no conflict between art displayed in institutional settings and art in public spaces–it is more a question of integration and complementarity: just as artists are interested in investigating the viewer/artwork relationship outside of the museum setting, so museum curators have come to view art in public spaces as an extension and enrichment of what takes place inside the exhibition venue”. [AAVV, Piccolo Museion/Cubo Garutti, Mousse Publishing, 2015]

[17] Until 2013 Garutti was until Professor of Painting at Accademia di Belle Art di Brera in Milan; he still teaches arts and design at the IUAV in Venice and architecture at the Politecnico in Milan.

[18] In the work Ai nati oggi the streetlights of a given place in the city (a street, a square, a bridge) get brighter every time a child is born. The maternity ward in a hospital in the city is equipped with a button that can be pushed by the staff at each new birth; the button makes the streetlight system gradually increase the intensity of the light, a surge that then subsides back to normal in about thirty seconds.

[19]J.G. Ballard, Extreme Metaphors. Collected interviews, Eds. Simon Sellars, Dan O’hara, Fourth Estate 2014

[20]Alberto Garutti, Didascalia, Mousse Publishing, 2012

[21] The work, commissioned by Fondazione Zegna as part of “All’aperto” project, curated by Andrea Zegna and Barbara Casavecchia, consists of a series of benches, distributed in various places of Trivero (BI), on which are located concrete sculptures faithfully depicting dogs belonging to the families of the city.

[22]Ibid, Piccolo Museion/Cubo Garutti

Link to publication: click here.

Setting aside the ceramics and sculptural works that have dominated his more recent output, for his first solo show at Zero …, entitled ‘Il mio cuore sulla spiaggia’ (My Heart on the Beach), Alessandro Pessoli returned to focus on canvas, using brushwork, screen printing and stencils. While there is no doubt about Pessoli’s deep-rooted belief in the elastic possibilities of painting, here the choice of medium seemed a deliberate trip down memory lane, one possibly aimed at renegotiating the formal and theoretical framework of the artist’s production to date (and, given that his oeuvre spans three decades, hopefully one made in anticipation of a much-deserved retrospective of his work).

In this new series of paintings, comprising 14 (mostly small) canvases, one recurring theme was still lifes of fish. At first sight, this subject matter may appear less psychologically and emotionally charged than others previously chosen by Pessoli – such as his visionary rendezvous with religious imagery, or his investigations of how personal histories are interwoven with the larger, national narrative. Nonetheless, of all the possible subjects for a classical still life composition, fish are perhaps the most puzzling (could it be because they evoke both religious and sexual references at the same time?) and possibly also the most melancholic (perhaps because of their eyes, always wide open and staring sadly at the onlooker). This sense of melancholia was reinforced by other motifs in the paintings on display – empty boats, tiny anchors, deserted seashores – and by the subtle resemblance to the kind of fine art reproductions one might find in a pizzeria by the sea: faded mechanical copies of Canaletto and the like. A rather comforting feeling of nostalgia was also suggested by the cartoonish approach with which the subjects are often treated, evoking Bruno Bozzetto’s animated cartoon series from the 1970s, an iconography that Pessoli has frequently explored.

The artist’s nimbleness of thought, enhanced by his colourful imagination, allows for such non-stop shifts between themes, motifs and genres. In fact, it has always been standard procedure for Pessoli to mix personal associations with references to popular culture and allusions to art history, from the Italian Renaissance to European pop – or, in this case, the long tradition of marine-themed still life in the work of 20th-century Italian painters such as Carlo Carrà, Filippo De Pisis and Scipione. Nonetheless, the almost complete absence of the human figure, which has been prominent throughout Pessoli’s career up to this point, is certainly atypical. There are no bodies, only the occasional face – the artist’s own – emerging from a pile of fish, hiding behind stylized sunglasses or peeping out of a sailing boat. Rather than being the subject of his paintings, though, Pessoli appears as a bystander, caught while yearningly observing the same scene that we are viewing, presumably of the waterfront of Cervia, the seaside resort on the Adriatic Riviera where the artist was born and brought up.

Expectations of a nostalgic, warm-hearted exhibition were encouraged by the subject of the paintings, the artist’s return to canvas, the intimate scale of the paintings and even the show’s title. Yet, these were somehow tempered by the work’s pragmatic, slightly impersonal display. The overly neat hanging of the pieces and the polished look of the space kept the melancholic tropes of the single works from forming a cohesive whole. I was prompted to think of the opening line of a book by Gesualdo Bufalino, Argo il cieco (Blind Argus, 1984): ‘I was young and happy one summer, in 1951. Neither before nor after; just that summer.’ Here, enduring memories of happy days by the seaside are defined as a single space-time unit, a solitary postcard removed from a shelved shoebox. There seemed to be a similar logic at play in this show: the artist’s heart and spirit – the playfulness, the spontaneity, the liveliness captured even within the still life images – only emerged when standing extremely close to the individual paintings; if one stepped back to observe the whole show from a distance, the same expressive exuberance seemed somehow confined – as if happiness were limited to just a single summer

From: Frieze Magazine, No 174, October 2015

Originally published on: Nicola Ricciardi et al, Patrick Tuttofuoco. Portraits. Portraits, Portraits (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2015), 5–27.

Though it might seem out of place for a monograph on an artist, this book could easily begin with a first person pronoun. Not singular (“…I, I…! …The filthiest of all pronouns!”[1]), but plural: a We that groups together all the voices in this publishing project, united not by not their lines of investigation—all quite separate and distinct from each other—but by having crossed paths with Patrick Tuttofuoco, and having become part of his work as a result. If in describing the first fifteen years of this artist’s career, we may indulge in a few flashes of collective self-reference, it’s because sharing, plurality, and the polyphonic experience are key cogwheels in his creative mechanism. This book perhaps arose out of the desire and ambition to translate the Tuttofuoco rhizome into words: to spell out, in a collaboratively written book, the We that the artist generates and belongs to. There is, however, a second important motivation behind this initiative: the firm belief that the rhetoric that has been used to date in describing Tuttofuoco’s artistic adventure is too polarized between the pre- and post-2008 periods of his work, and that what is now needed is a tool of interpretation aimed at knitting together these two dimensions that seem antinomic, but upon closer observation are complementary and share the same investigative impulse.

The two main chapters of the artist’s story are both tied to a geographic connection. The first coincides with his time in Milan, the city where he was born and where he studied—first under Corrado Levi at the Politecnico and then under Alberto Garutti at the Accademia di Brera. For Tuttofuoco, these are years marked by the euphoric discovery of art, the revelations of masters (Ettore Sottsass, Mike Kelley, Thomas Schutte), and the parallel liberation—not just his own, but that of an entire generation—from the burdensome legacy of Arte Povera and the Transavanguardia. These are years marked by a highly participatory approach to the artwork, with an aesthetic that drew on American neo-Pop currents and on radical architecture in Italy and the rest of Europe. But for Tuttofuoco these are above all years of speed, embodied by works like Otto (2000), Velodream (2001), Bycircle (2004), Revolving Landscape (2006). It is no coincidence that the element that almost systematically accompanies the artist on this horizontal and vertical race is light; the material he relies on most is neon, now free of the semantic chains of Arte Povera and brought back to the plane of playfulness . All this resplendence, along with his keen attention to the formal aspects of the work, swiftly make Tuttofuoco the harbinger of a new accessibility in contemporary art, perfectly in step with the times. The words that come up most often in reviews of his exhibitions from that era are “immersive”, “relational”, “interactive”: a guarantee that viewers won’t run the risk of dozing off. An incisive synthesis of this view can be found in the enthusiastic public reaction to Luna Park (2005). Saved from the sweeping demolition of the Porta Nuova district of Milan, and relocated to the booming context of Via Ventura, the sign from the Varesine amusement park looks like highlighter on the decorous face of gentrification: the gleaming spaceship of art touching down in the neighborhood with promises of redemption (“All we had to do was wait for dawn, patient and resigned”[2]). Yet if one puts the work into a broader time frame, alongside the glimmer of neon there seems to be a darker, more melancholy luminescence, which cannot be linked only to Tuttofuoco’s nostalgia for the world of memories evoked by that fragment of an irrecoverable Milan, but to a lucid awareness of the fragile, indeterminate nature of the urban fabric. Those words, the memento of an adolescent happiness that seeks a new home (but runs up against the inevitable loss of innocence) takes on the status of a prophetic memento mori (in part ignored, as one can see from the economic problems that plagued Via Ventura after the recession of 2007/2008). Applying the same yardstick to other works of that period, one notes that deep down, all of Tuttofuoco’s work is haunted by a spectral melancholy that is not immediately visible, that the artist keeps concealed. One need only to think of the doomed positivism of Criceto (Hamster, 1999). Most of the literature from those years of speed seems to focus however on the glitter of this merry-go-round, loudly underscored by the casual viewer, who sees Tuttofuoco as the embodiment of a euphoric new global outlook that promises wonders. But when 2007 rolls around, with the great recession, the merry-go-round comes to a brusque halt. Tuttofuoco tries to tell us that he never really put viewers on that painted pony just for kicks, but rather to show that round and round, you always come back to where you started (as in Criceto, for instance). But as the contemporary art bubble is on the verge of bursting, his race seems too unbridled, too perfect not to become an apologia of the pedal-to-the-metal mindset that so speedily led to disaster.

This is where the second chapter in Tuttofuoco’s story begins, with his move to Berlin, in 2008. The scale and language of his work seem to mutate, as do the opinions on his work. His pieces become darker and more cryptic, even vaguely threatening. His imagery swarms with ghosts and giants: anthropomorphic distillations of growing concerns. The face predominates as the central element, often rendered as something vague, evolving, in search of a fleeting stability. Tuttofuoco shifts his attention from the gaudy vivacity of neon to the introspection of the mask; his exhibitions seem to confirm that the party is over (as Luca Cerizza aptly notes). To stick with the metaphor of the amusement park, it seems like the artist is inviting the viewer to hop off the merry-go-round only to be led into a hall of funhouse mirrors: the faces that inhabit the exhibitions “First Person Plural” (2009), “Mirrors and Windows” (2009), or “Three Wise Monkeys” (2010) are bewildering, discordant, spectral at times. This new aesthetic, less aestheticizing and more Teutonic, is to some degree experienced and described as an essential abandonment of the viewer: it is telling, in this sense, that even in 2015, at the inauguration of …Mom, Dad, Tuttofuoco’s installation in Milan’s Piazzetta Brera, an anonymous visitor turned—unwittingly—to the artist himself to complain about the lack of electric lighting. Critics seemed equally divided, to some degree disoriented. While previously, the curatorial consensus had been near unanimous, as one could also see from his participation in major international events, in the second half of Tuttofuoco’s career to date, opinions have become polarized between those who see a significant and positive evolution in his work, and those who think the artist is going backwards. Albeit with notable exceptions, some by the contributors to this publication, a dialectic has been established that contrasts the Tuttofuoco of neon with the Tuttofuoco of masks. It is hard to be satisfied with this antinomic approach. The book you are holding is a modest attempt to weave the two passages together into a single fabric, to delve into Tuttofuoco’s artistic language and bring to light a shared lexicon. This exploration began at the end of 2013, but decisively stepped up its pace between April 9 and May 22, 2015, when a series of events provided a possible guiding thread in the guise of three epiphanies (deriving from three artworks).

The first of these phantom visitors took the form of Canova’s Napoleon Bonaparte as Mars the Peacemaker, a bronze copy of which stands at the center of the Accademia di Brera’s main courtyard (right in front of the classroom where Tuttofuoco studied). I passed by it repeatedly in the period when I was working with Tuttofuoco on the installation of ….Mom, Dad in the adjacent Piazzetta Brera. The latter is itself an homage to two iconic works of classical statuary: a bust of Nefertiti and a bust of Alexander the Great. In …Mom, Dad, their faces are gigantically enlarged, stretched out over curved steel surfaces, in tinted halftone. Due to this distortion of form and color, the copy, while faithful, becomes allegorical: it doesn’t portray the deeds of the two protagonists, but rather an idea of family, seen through the eyes of an inner child. The Brera’s Napoleon is also a sculpture of a sculpture—a bronze copy, cast by the Righetti brothers at least five years after Canova’s marble original. And it is also a distortion: the Emperor of France himself, when he saw it, thought it deviated too much from its model. Its sturdy athleticism, its muscularity, had no real-world equivalent; Napoleon seemed smoothed, elongated, to achieve the allegorical style to which Canova aspired. Thinking back to how the faces of Nefertiti and Alexander the Great were similarly faithful and yet unrepresentative, I caught myself wondering whether Tuttofuoco, despite his penchant for embodying his own era, isn’t more indebted to Canova than to Jason Rhoades. In other words, whether his art is primarily classical and classicizing.

The second epiphany came to me a few days but many kilometers later, when my wife Elisa and I visited the Baglioni chapel, in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Spello, on our way to Perugia. Pinturicchio’s famous fresco cycle is embellished with a small and in some ways pioneering element. In a scene of the Annunciation, on a wall of Mary’s meticulously detailed room, is a framed picture of Pinturicchio himself, over a bejeweled plaque engraved with the words “Berrnardinvs pictoricius pervsinvs”. The apparition and treatment of this self-portrait in the form of domestic decor called to mind one of the images by Tuttofuoco that means the most to me: a photo taken while producing the show “Ambaradan” at Studio Guenzani, Milan in 2014 (which later became an independent work, Mr Potato). In this image, we see one of the sculptures in the exhibition, flipped over and held by someone only visible as a pair of hands and legs, below the knee. Yet the hot pink Nikes on his feet sum up Tuttofuoco’s presence in a strikingly clear, emblematic way: they’re a sly fui hic, the postmodern equivalent of Pinturicchio’s face in that Umbrian fresco. In both cases—though with obvious, necessary distinctions—the artist’s hidden image is a personal seal that definitively claims ownership of his artistic product, making it something no longer alienable, but rather a direct emanation of his subjectivity. The object of the depiction may be an Annunciation, or the face of an omenone, but the subject remains the artist.

The third and last epiphany took the form of a work by Alighiero Boetti that I found myself handling that May (due to research by Cristina Baldacci and an exhibition curated by Vincenzo de Bellis): Autoritratto a Rank Xerox 0. This piece, from 1969, consists in 12 photocopies of the artist’s face. Boetti almost always uses technology in ways that were not intended, and the photocopier is no exception: the artist’s aim is not, in this case, to multiply his image, but rather to communicate with the machine itself—even though the latter is not equipped to speak, much less to listen. To overcome this conceptual impasse and establish a hypothetical, surreal attempt at dialogue, Boetti resorts to sign language, and each time photocopies not only his face, but a gesture for one of the letters in the word autoritratto, “self-portrait”. What connects this specific piece to Tuttofuoco’s work at large (aside from the hands, an element that crops up in many recent projects, from Ambaradan to the piece he is working on for HangarBicocca as this goes to press) is the relationship between the expression of the artist’s own subjectivity and the delegation of production to someone else. For Boetti, at least in this case, the outsourcing is entrusted to the machine, which through this forced dialogue generates the artwork for him. For Tuttofuoco, who grew up in an era when the fascination with media and technology already seemed to have run its course, the deputation is reserved for the many intellectual collaborators and artisan associates he surrounds himself with: examples of an active, collegial participation inspired by the spread of open-source dynamics. Looking at Boetti’s 12 photocopies, and thinking of the 12 portraits Tuttofuoco made for the exhibition “DYNASTY” (which opened on May 22 at Dispari&Dispari Project in Reggio Emilia), it seems clear that for the latter, seriality is not a prerogative of the final product, but rather of the production factors.

I hope readers will forgive me for taking the poetic license of mingling references as divergent as they are anachronistic, but it was by aligning these three works, like lenses in a telescope, that I first realized an important truth about Tuttofuoco that spans his whole career. The three works mentioned above have much in common with the artist’s oeuvre: the indirectly classical (and perhaps unconsciously classicist) nature, the concealed depiction of the artist’s subjectivity through the figuration of others, the parallel between the multiple identity of the artist and the multiple subjects involved in the work. But they are also, above all, three portraits. Starting from this obvious consideration, I tried to find a similar alignment in the works that Tuttofuoco made between 1999 and 2015, and was surprised to note how his urge towards portraiture became ever clearer. The neon and masks seemed indissolubly linked by Tuttofuoco’s desire to portray someone (primarily himself). While this desire is explicit in works such as Famiglia (1999), Dojo (2000 e 2003), and Giovi (2015), in projects like Velodream (2001) and Bycircle, (2004) the portraiture becomes caricature. But doesn’t the same definition also perhaps apply to Grattacielo (2000)—actually a group photo translated into architecture—or …Mom, Dad (2015)—a family portrait in the form of an urban sculpture? Even Luna Park (2005), in its function as a sign, is an abstraction of the portrait concept; the upside-down scooter in Ambaradan (2014) could be a postmodern equivalent to ThePicture of Dorian Gray. As even the title of this book makes clear, portraits are the leitmotiv that has been chosen to map out the first fifteen years of Patrick Tuttofuoco’s aesthetic adventure: a potential key to interpretation, not intended to be definitive, but which aspires to stimulate and suggest a reading of the artist’s work that has been stripped of dichotomies and circumstantial preconceptions. Each of the contributors responded in their own way to this invitation, yielding the choral polyphony that—as noted at the beginning of this long digression—is fundamentally important to Tuttofuoco himself. In the end, it is up to the reader to decide whether these ideas hover separately between the lines, or come together to form, page by page, the portrait of an unexpected portraitist.

[1]Carlo Emilio Gadda, La cognizione del dolore, 1963

[2] From the song “Sballi ravvicinati del terzo tipo” by Vasco Rossi, 1979

Link to publication: click here.

His abstract sculptures – with their mixture of architecture, music, mathematics and science delicately expressed in brass, ceramics or plaster – unarguably labeled Fausto Melotti (1901-1986) as one of Italy’s most iconic and recognizable artists of the post- war period. Yet, for Italian readers who approached literature in the nineties, Melotti’s work has too-often been experienced as the “supporting act” to the written virtuosity of the great writer Italo Calvino: from the late eighties onwards, pictures of Melotti’s sculptures have appeared on the covers of almost all of Calvino’s books published in Italy, over time re-shaping the general public’s perception of such works. The reciprocal influence of the writer and the artist, dated from the seventies, is known and well-documented: their individual creative processes coincided in time, with the rigor and lightness of one coming to be mirrored by the abstraction and geometry of the other. Nonetheless, Melotti’s autonomous aesthetic contribution to Italian art has, of course, much deeper roots that his (unwitting) visual contribution to Calvino’s oeuvre.

One of the many merits of the exhibition “Fausto Melotti” at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco is precisely that it disentangles the two artists, it showcases the “Melotti-before-Calvino”: a sculptor in fieri, walking the tightrope between craftsmanship and the art world but already moving freely among and between plaster, ceramics, and metals, turning them into poetic gestures and visionary meditations. Curated by Eva Fabbris and Cristiano Raimondi, the show brings together around 20 metallic sculptures and more than 70 ceramic pieces, almost all of which have been published photographically within the pages of Domus magazine between 1948 and 1968 (before the friendship with Calvino blossomed into an intellectual jam session).  The result is a visual manifestation of another of Melotti’s intense artistic relationship, that with the influential architecture magazine (and with its founder, Gio Ponti), which in turn reveals a polymorphous figure: Melotti the artist, the columnist, the reviewer, the careful critic. Using the lens of Domus to examine Melotti both avoids the clichéd historical approach and lends an intriguing perspective to his multidisciplinary art.

The second notable merit of the show is the way in which such “multidisciplinarity” is presented and displayed. The design of the exhibition – by Valter Scelsi and Baukuh – is elaborate, blending elegance and intensity, words and works, via the clever use of mirrors to break up the space and establish the tempo. This sense of rhythm is key, as it reflects a central theme of Melotti’s sculpture: born into a musical family, the sculptor often combined his investigations on the nature of art and architecture with the aesthetics of the score, uniting straight lines and curves with concave and convex elements to create harmonious compositions and multiple visual melodies. Writing about his creative process, the artist said: “I think that’s something similar to what happens to a composer: he goes to the piano, puts his hands on the keys, and out come the sounds, which are then organized in a pattern”. Yet, even if Melotti is known to be professionally influenced by classical music, the Monaco exhibition – with its purposeful and crafted miscellany of sculptures, photographs, ephemera, magazines and memorabilia – is a tangible reminder that, when working in his studio, the artist preferred to listen to the unpredictable flow of the radio rather than Bach.

Finally, the third significant virtue of this curatorial endeavor is the side-long offering of the work of another, much younger, Italian artist: Alessandro Pessoli (1963), whose ceramics and painted majolica are presented in the Project Room on the third floor of Villa Paloma (until September 29th). Pessoli and Melotti not only share an uncommon dexterity for free movement between different materials, but also a peculiar nimbleness of thought, which is enhanced by their colorful imagination, allowing them to flow smoothly through themes, motifs and genres. Yet, seen within the halls of Villa Paloma, not so distant from one another, the respective pieces illustrate another appealing parallel: the amalgamation of the disparate strains of Italian art. Between them, Pessoli and Melotti tackle the iconography of Florentine Renaissance, the Futurists’ embrace of modernity, the metaphysical cravings of the Surrealists and the material curiosity of traditional craftsmanship. This taste for diversity is probably best expressed in an article entitled L’Incertezza (uncertainty) that Melotti published on Domus in 1963. With words that to a contemporary ear sound simultaneously naïve and cathartic, the artist complains that to satisfy the needs of the market “it is necessary, it is demanded, that all the works of an artist be rigidly labeled”. “But speaking of our uncertainty,” he adds, “we don’t think of the sublime, almost theological indecision of the great spirits.” Melotti then ends his protest with a set of poetic words that might have been written unknowingly for the purpose of describing precisely the continuum between his own aesthetic practice and Pessoli’s: “For all one knows, the horse that goes hopping mad and kicks against the fence may be just dreaming of nothingness”.

From: Mousse Magazine, Issue 50, September 2015

Nicola Ricciardi: With a substantial volume of research, a wealth of artists and a grand platform such as Palazzo Reale, even three months before it opens its doors to the first visitor “The Great Mother” already looks like a seminal exhibition for Fondazione Trussardi. In advance of its opening in late August, can you give us a virtual, inaugural tour of the show you’ve curated?

 Massimilinao Gioni: The exhibition is quite wide-ranging with more than 130 artists and plenty of documents and visual materials. I am afraid I don’t even know anymore how many individual objects are in the exhibition… Thus it is not an easy show to summarize in a few words. The exhibition begins in 1900, the year of publication of Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams”, which forever transformed the ways family were imagined and perceived and the relationships between mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons. The first rooms speak of this world of dreams and repressed desires. There are beautiful works including Brancusi’s “The Newborn”, a reproduction of Ingres’ “Oedipus and the Sphinx” that Freud kept on the sofa of his patients and a ruthless drawing by Meret Oppenheim with an exterminating angel slaughtering children. It’s maternity as seen from the point of view of dreams, perhaps nightmares. Following are a series of rooms dedicated to historical avant-gardes—in particular Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism—which present the attitudes of these groups towards women, sexuality and gender. Another important section is dedicated to the representation of motherhood during the war, where documents from the fascism era are interwoven with sculptures by Thomas Schütte and engravings by Käthe Kollowitz. The exhibition continues with Louise Bourgeois and gradually moves towards feminist practices of the sixties and seventies, represented by works of art but also archival documents. Finally come the nineties and the post-human: an era in which genres and gender roles tend to disappear altogether.

 NR: From hearing you speak about it, I got the impression that central to your vision is the transition of the woman in the twentieth century from object of representation to operational subject. It also seems to me that the show is offering a reflection on the power of women in the arts. And this makes me wonder: what do you think of gender politics and agendas in Italy and the Italian art system in particular?

 MG: I must say that the show is so full of ideas, images and works that it makes me a little uncomfortable to start the conversation talking about power and the art world. Of course, you could say that this is one of the hearts of the matter here—and one might as well address the problem openly. But the show is not about quotas or who is in power in Italy. The issue is deeper: when I say that “The Great Mother” speaks of the relationship between women and power, I’m thinking of who has the right to legislate on her own body. I think of those who have the right to express their desires, I think of who does, or does not, have the right to build an image, represent an aspiration, construct a myth. In relation to Italy, I could say that it’s a pleasant anomaly that three of the most important art foundations are led by women—Prada, Sandretto, Trussardi. Or point out that, despite this is still a sexist country, there is a long great tradition of very respected curators and directors of museums who are women—Palma Bucarelli, Carla Lonzi, Ida Giannelli, Carolyn Christoph Bakargiev, just to name a few. In terms of gender politics, certainly one could talk about the huge differences and imbalances between Italy and the US. I think the exhibition alludes to some of these problems but from a deeper, more symbolic perspective.

NR: Speaking of imbalances, reading the list of names in “The Great Mother”, I couldn’t help but notice that there are very few Italian female artists in comparison to their international colleagues. Did the disparity between the number of female and male artists in Italy emerge as a significant finding during the research for this show?

MG: Again, I don’t think that’s one of the central issues here. There are other absences that concern me more. As Adrienne Rich observes in her wonderful book “Of Woman Born”, I’m painfully aware of the partiality of my choices and of my perspectives — which is Western as this reflects the majority of the sources that are available to me. There are no Chinese, Indian or African artists in this exhibition, which means it’s missing whole other parts of the world; but then you have to deal with budget constraints, with logistical problems, and above all with, again, one’s own perspective. In general, I thought that focusing on a few key issues was more productive than trying to cover the entire globe, at the cost of diluting the scope of the research. In addition, when working on a theme so vast, superficial global ambitions may result in easy mistakes: issues such as birth control or the use of contraceptives are extremely different from country to country, culture to culture.

NR: What were your main references for “The Great Mother”? Given the subject and the title, parallels have been drawn with “La Mamma”, the unrealized exhibition by Harald Szeemann. Is it just a coincidence or was it intentional?

MG: “The Great Mother” first came about as a reaction to the theme of the Expo 2015—that is, nutrition. I wanted to find an angle that could be connected to this topic, but in depth. From there came the idea of an exhibition on the figure of the mother, as the archetype of nutrition. Of course, when you start thinking about such a powerful issue, many avenues of research open up immediately. But from the very beginning we tried to stay as far as possible from comforting representations or stereotypes of motherhood, like those used in advertising or for nationalist and populist rhetoric purposes. Rather the contrary: for us, talking about motherhood in the twentieth century always meant telling a much more troubling, compelling story. The comparison with Szeemann’s unrealized exhibition scared me at first, mainly because I didn’t want to engage so directly and explicitly with his work, although his exhibition “Bachelor Machines” does have an important role in “The Great Mother”. But thanks to the help of Pietro Rigolo, who is a Researcher at the Getty and works precisely on Szeemann’s archive, we started to look more carefully at his project and it soon became clear that the two shows were completely different. “La Mamma” of Szeemann was not intended to be a show of male or female artists, but rather an exhibition of women who had not become mothers but have nonetheless expressed their creativity in other ways.

NR: After talking about past references, I think there are a few novelties worth pointing out here: for the first time, Fondazione Trussardi instead of showcasing a monographic exhibition presents a thematic group show. Moreover, instead of opening the doors of places otherwise far from the conventional routes of contemporary art, it engages with a major museum, Palazzo Reale. Are these momentary changes that will remain an exception in the programming of the Fondazione, or it is a new direction that you intend to pursue?

MG: There are many reasons for this choice, some of which are merely pragmatic: we wanted to do a major exhibition, with loans from major museums, and you can’t get a painting by Dali or Frida Kahlo—or 50 collages by Max Ernst—if you’re not in a museum. We simply couldn’t show those works in the places that we usually use. Moreover, one of the main characteristics of Fondazione Trussardi is to be flexible: its identity is in continuous construction. With “The Great Mother” we’re trying yet another solution, we’re adding another layer, opening up new possibilities. The continuing transformations represent our true consistency. Lastly, let me say that after more than ten years of activity, it is somehow pleasing to reach into, and engage with, institutional venues; not to be self-congratulatory but simply to show that we know how to work in different context.

From: Mousse Magazine, Issue 49, June 2015