DISCIPLINAM PONE IN CORDE TUO
Casoli Studio,
Milan 1990
THE EXHIBITION
As well as a library, you could imagine a museum of ethnology or zoology (I am thinking of a butterfly room in the zoological museum)… The relationship between walls laden with images, and works in space stimulates imagining cataloguing places.
Each individual work contains in itself the idea of the series. They live side by side as in a flow, in which each single work acquires importance.
In the exhibition there is a use of styles and techniques that share with historic abstractionism both its cultured, more pictorial matrix and its popular, decorative one. You pass from a decorative to a symbolic manner, to a greater abstraction. The white casts obtained in aluminium moulds in which sweets are prepared go alongside blocks of drawing paper (also white) and the colour painted below the wooden surfaces reverberates on everything. It is as if the colour drowned the materials designed for painting.
So, in reality, I have emptied the space filling it to the level of paradox, and thus I show it as an apparition. An apparition cannot be the consequence of a simple evocation, it is always the result of work. Emptying and dematerialising are part of putting a work together, an accumulation and not a renunciation.
I could not use the term «installation» for this exhibition. Here there is no work in which a visitor can enter and feel that he has become an integral part of it. There is always a frontal relationship, a challenge between each of the exhibits and the spectator…
THE ARTWORKS
The works of art in the exhibition were all produced on printers’ sheets on which the invitation to the preceding Tucci Russo exhibition had been printed. On each sheet, approximate size 50 x 70 cm, the word GAS had been repeatedly printed, vertically. On these sheets, using rubber rollers, I had painted vertical bands in oil following the advancement of the word, covering it with colour, sometimes in a homogeneous manner, sometimes transparently and at other times leaving it visible. The sheets were then laid side by side to form pictures that could take on the great dimensions of a fresco or the form of architectonic decorations (like the enamelled paint-work on the lower parts of walls to protect them from wear) or smaller dimensions, as if they were abstract paintings. I was interested in giving solid form to the colour of the preceding exhibition, in completing the process of crystallisation and precipitation, in an almost chemical sense, that had begun with such luminosity. Giving body to a phantom, grabbing it by the throat.
PHOTOS: FABIO CIRIFINO (Studio Azzurro)
