exhibitions / other
2024
Matteo Cremonesi // Fantasmagorie
banquet – Milan, Italy
… A questioning about survival and the dark return of impressions, stories, and symbols, and their ability to be grafted into contemporary fabric.
As suggested by the title of the exhibition itself, Cremonesi’s work insinuates itself into an uncertain territory of apparitions and specters, where the echo of a peculiar pictorial tradition encounters the crossing of literary and cinematographic imaginaries characterized by a violent and distorting confrontation with modernity and its demands…
Mario Silva // UNALINE
banquet – Milan, Italy
UNALINE is space of expression and execution. Dynamic moment whose departure and arrival are predefined. Motion from- and to-place whose sections are left free to be interpreted and combined with each other.
It has a beginning and an end…
2023
Milano Drawing Week // Umberto Chiodi
OPR Gallery – Milan, Italy
MDW award winning exhibition
… Umberto Chiodi presents a project developed in three chapters, each collecting a series of drawings (44 in total) on paper of different formats, made in 2023. The artist uses three subjects of encyclopedic character – flowers, the alphabet, animals – to investigate different possibilities of the language of drawing and its relations to the space of the support and the environment.
Il mondo di sotto // Isabella Nazzarri
OPR Gallery – Milan, Italy
Text by Rossella Farinotti
… The different works that make up “Il mondo di sotto” – medium and large canvases, eventually leading to a large work – give the possibility of digging under tree roots, entering the ground, sinking with it to re-emerge on the other side. In the gallery, the artist has created an immersive installation device: topsoil overlays the floor of a room. One has to interact with a natural environment, here disorienting, new…
… It is a subconscious world. Down below, upside down. The large painting is like a portal to delve into the roots of the trees, the visceral depth of the earth, the moisture and warmth of the soil. Nazzarri has created a large envelope to encompass, immerse the viewer in his experience and immerse him in that introspective (and shamanic) path that ideally creeps in and plumbs new ways and perspectives of seeing things, turning them inside out in nature, in the landscape, in a rediscovered habitat…
Nature Morte // Fabrizio Bellomo
OPR Gallery – Milan, Italy
Curated by Giangiacomo Cirla
As Marco Petrella states in the Bulletin of the Italian Association of Cartography, 2019 (167), 28-39:
[…] If in France it is in the post-revolutionary age that we witness the elevation, to which cartographic production contributes, of food as a monument of territories, it is in Fascist Italy that a new mode of patrimonialisation of food linked to regional identity and conveyed through tourist publicity is established. […] In the Fascist Italy of the 1930s, therefore, are located some initiatives destined to leave their marks in the birth of a cultural conception of food that becomes, like other local expressions, a monument and iconema of the territory. Laying the foundations of this new configuration are a series of actions to promote tourism and gastronomy. The first, developed in Milan within the Italian Touring Club, is the 1931 “Guida Gastronomica d’Italia” (Portincasa, 2008). The second is a brochure produced by Enit, L’Italie gastronomique in which, alongside a descriptive text in French appears a Carte des principales specialités gastronomiques des regions italiennes. With it, the body takes the lead in a document designed to convey Italy’s food identity abroad through the icon of regional cuisines. Making the paper is one of the most experienced signatures of the magazine Le vie d’Italia, organ of Touring Club and Enit propaganda, the Romagna painter Umberto Zimelli (Morsia, 2016).
Pettegolezzi // Giuseppe De mattia – Presentazione del multiplo
OPR Gallery – Milan, Italy
Published by Aosta Publishing
Text by Treti Galaxie
I Pettegolezzi, is a series of canvases painted by De Mattia in which a rudimentary and derivative graphic design from other eras stands out, in which the author attempts an open dialogue with the world in a kind of comic strip in which the baloons represent caustic sentences where one does not take full responsibility for what is written, hiding behind the “it is said, it is whispered, they say, etc.”
In this series, De Mattia perpetuates his interest in tragicomedy. Here, in a kind of tragicomic poetry open with the world, he refers to the poster graphics of a precise moment in Italian cinema and theater.
The multiple Pettegolezzi, published by Aosta Publishing, (Florence) with a text by Treti Galaxie, produced by the Matèria gallery (Rome) and OPR Gallery (Milan), collects a handful of sketches for as many new canvases in the Pettegolezzi series.Browse our partner-sponsored Glasses, with a variety of options to suit every taste and budget, available to buy online
Accept & Decline // Carlo Zanni
OPR Gallery – Milan, Italy
Critical text by Pau Waelder
… Through these artworks, Zanni presents us with spaces for pause and reflection, that do not intend to force a message into our pupils, but rather offer us the time to observe, to come closer, and let these landscapes unfold in front of us. Whereas the real interfaces of online shopping constantly nudge us into selecting, adding to cart, and checking out, the artworks created by Carlo Zanni let us patiently gaze at these processes that they simultaneously accept and decline…
2022
C’era una volta, ancora una volta // Marta Roberti
OPR Gallery – Milan, Italy
Critical text by Mauro Folci
… What is it that returns in the C’era una volta, ancora una volta that Marta proposes to us? It is the bottom that rises to the surface (without ceasing to be bottom), just to mention a series of the artist’s monochrome works where the dashed, maniacally repeated mark of the drawing-they are mostly brambles and mangroves-emerges luminous from the carbon-black background of the copying paper; the darkness is the power from which the light in action arises. A light, however, that leaps to the surface in an inextricable tangle of branches or impulses, as if to say that beyond the open is not the crystalline light of the free future but only a revelation. What returns is the memory of the body, of the motor organs that is essentially Habit, but before that what returns identical to itself is the a priori of everything, the undifferentiated power that oversees every act…
PRODUZIONE PROPRIA // Giuseppe De Mattia
OPR Gallery – Milan, Italy
Critical text by Gabriele Tosi and Orsola Vannocci Bonsi
… But Giuseppe’s installation is in no way a criticism of the Portuguese capital, and probably not a sour comment on gentrification either. Let us take this work as a melancholic ode to the same melancholy that is so typical of this city, to a profound odi et amo for this old decadent Her that even if remade, faux-gleaming, underneath there is still the blinding light of early morning, the intoxicating smell of sardines and the meeting place of magic, people, souls, suspended time and cosmic alignments. Giuseppe therefore tries to bring these scales of ‘his’ Lisbon, allowing visitors to take home a piece of the city where precisely the artist, unlike today’s hordes of digital nomads, has always tried, because he felt like, to belong, to never be a tourist. The criticism in this case is perhaps to the speed of today’s world, which contrasts with those slow and muffled ways of living that are part of past, enchanting, magical stories. A contrast that becomes blatant in a city like Lisbon that still tries to adapt to this rhythm, but at the same time has been eaten up by it, and in the azulejo (the original ones) there is all the sublimated essence of this unhappy need to adapt, to chase the new by being eaten up, but at the same time somehow living with a visceral presence and attachment to the past…
Cookie Portrait // Carlo Zanni
OPR Gallery – Milan, Italy
“Cookie Portrait” began exploring the idea of online identity and privacy at least 16 years before cookies were regulated (GDPR), anticipating the advent of surveillance capitalism (or attention economy), which profits from the unlimited monitoring of people by large technology companies.
This work is based on the same cookie technology that is used – for instance – for the internal session management of an eCommerce site and more generally for user profiling and marketing activities.
“Cookie Portrait” is a text file automatically generated by the server where the work is installed, and sent to the browser of the person visiting the project page.
The text contains the settings of the connected user’s work environment, such as information about the operating system in use, device type, IP address, browser and other data, including a project statement and a sequence number.
The witch stage // Liza Amborssio
Fundacion Nadine – Madrid, Spain
Coming from the most dangerous undeclared country for a woman in the world, where it is easier to kill one of us than to steal a car, my view of fragility and strength is dangerously unstructured.
So in “The Witch Stage” I am making a declaration of responsibility, of empathy with their desire for freedom, of love for them that I am and that I am not, but that gave me a voice. Although taking up the logic of German, the word: tragen also belongs to the vocabulary of gestation (the mother carrying a child in her womb): for the unborn child, there is no world, and where there is none world I must carry you. And be this relationship between unborn and dead or alive and wounded; At the time of carrying you, I am away from the end of the world, I am away from the end of my world…
The witch stage // Liza Amborssio
OPR Gallery – Milan, Italy
In a society that strives to exterminate fragility and poetry “The witch stage” is presented as a thermometer of social decomposition, ironizes some principles of psychoanalysis that Sigmund Freud called “stages or faces” within his theory of psychosexual development which in turn mixed with conspiracy theories, social denunciations, thoughts, prejudices, the misogynistic questioning of the notions and symbols of witchcraft, criminology, traditions, punishments, uses and customs, pretending a synchronous representation of a global feminism that touches different geographical areas.
Crossing the Mexican, Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese imaginary, I allow myself to explore visual similarities of a story so represented that it seems forbidden. As a pretext to speak of the prevailing unwritten right to commit violence against women and the feminine. I’m leaving crumbs of non-textual cases of territories and cultures, with no apparent connection beyond their exacerbated telluric belly, which refer me to Derrida’s seismic lexicon in which I remember emphasizing that “a tremor can be the result of something that It has affected you or the tremor without apparent explanation can also affect you ”, it may scare you. I was born in Mexico City after a great earthquake and I left Mexico before another great earthquake happened, just like my country of origin; Italy, Spain, France, and Japan contain a seismic heart due to their volcanoes and mountain ranges that according to my suspicions also modify the pulse and impulses of their inhabitants…
2021
Ettore Tripodi – Giorgio de Chirico
OPR Gallery – Milan, Italy
Critical text by Giorgio Bacci
If we playfully combine statements and thoughts on drawing by Ettore Tripodi and Giorgio de Chirico, we obtain a puzzle composed of suggestive assonances and unexpected juxtapositions that reach back to their earliest years, when the two future artists sought the approval of their father, painter in one case, engineer Evaristo in the other, spending time drawing. In an imaginary dialogue, Ettore would affirm that “ever since I was a child I have spent a lot of time drawing” and the Pictor Optimus would proudly reply that “at the age when other children were beginning to learn to read and write, Giorgio de Chirico was already exercising his drawing hand on a large sheet of paper” (1929). For both, the astonishment of discovery applies, of the drawing that outlines a form starting from an idea, of inspiration (“full possession of the craft” in Elena Pontiggia’s words), which merges with revelation (“the intuition of an unknown world, of a metaphysical reality”, Pontiggia writes). Tripodi has done well to choose Ninfe nel Bosco, in which the dense cross-hatching defines a scene of vibrant graphic epidermis: the lines dig into the paper thickly, sculpt bodies, snap like whips, reminding us on the one hand that the line must always be stopped “at its beginning and at its end”, and on the other that “the draughtsman and the painter, in front of the sheet of paper and the canvas, are like the sculptor in front of the block of clay or marble. What will come out of the clay or canvas is already inside, sleeping” (both are quotations from de Chirico, Brevis pro plastica oratio, “Aria d’Italia”, winter 1940). And yet, these shuddering pops become crackling foliage and verdant meadows (or so one imagines when one sees the watercoloured brown ink), trees and sensually naked bodies: the stroke turns from harsh to delicate, placing the classical past (the Nymphs) in a timeless forest…
EXCESS ISLAND // Benedetta Panisson
OPR Gallery – Milan, Italy
Curated by: Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián
UVEA
Images Gibellina – Gibellina, Italy
Artistic direction: Giangiacomo Cirla – Elena Rebecca Rivolta
Video by: Francesca Ruberto
Music by: Francesca Ruberto – Lorenzo Corazza
Artists: Yana Pirozhok – Federico Ciamei – Fabrizio Bellomo – Matteo Cremonesi – Liza Ambrossio – Leonardo Magrelli – Domonkos Varga
The narrative development produced since the emancipation of the internet and digital technologies has outlined the profile of a territory characterised by the coexistence and collaboration of a multiplicity of perspectives and languages. Through its archive, PHROOM proposes a horizontal exploration in which the images of some of the authors present on the platform collaborate in the construction of a moving landscape.
Zapping the Archive
Bleschunov Municipal Museum
Odesa Photo Days – Odessa, Ukraine
223 (Lin Zipeng) – Brandy Eve Allen – Liza Ambrossio – Fabrizio Bellomo – Matteo Cremonesi – Marco Dapino – Giuseppe De Mattia – Irene Fenara – Maria de la O Garrido – Jaakko Kahilaniemi – Seunggu Kim – Yulia Krivich – Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee – Alexandra Lethbridge – Camille Lévêque – Sergey Melnitchenko – Giovanni Oberti – Eva Ostrowska – Benedetta Panisson – Gloria Pasotti – Sarah Michelle Riisager – Piero Roi – Simone Sapienza – Agnieszka Sejud – Alberto Singaglia – Enrico Smerilli – Marinos Tsagkarakis – Sybren Vanoverberghe – Karolina Wojtas – Alba Zari
In a world spoiled by the grammar of digital communication and the neoliberal production relationships that want everything capable of being shared and consumed faster and faster, the suspicion is growing that photographic language is increasingly losing the ability to report linguistic and postural autonomies, nourishing the impression of an imminent disappearance of the figure of the other and his images and expressions.
This makes a reflection on the work of census, selection, storage and use made by the new emerging research platforms an interesting subject to evaluate and possibly recognize the instances of this suspicion.
By attributing an interest in processing an observation thus proposed, PHROOM exhibits a selection of images from its archives, a choice of authors to each of whom, alongside others, is given the opportunity to report both linguistic autonomy and at the same time the ability to constitute, with his signs, an active part of a choral voice capable of outlining a thematic, disciplinary and aesthetic territory, to which refer as to intercept the most urgent instances of contemporary linguistic expression in the visual field.
Zapping the Archive
Insight Foto Festival – Varese, Italy
223 (Lin Zipeng) – Brandy Eve Allen – Liza Ambrossio – Fabrizio Bellomo – Matteo Cremonesi – Marco Dapino – Giuseppe De Mattia – Irene Fenara – Maria de la O Garrido – Jaakko Kahilaniemi – Seunggu Kim – Yulia Krivich – Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee – Alexandra Lethbridge – Camille Lévêque – Ann Massal – Sergey Melnitchenko – Giovanni Oberti – Eva Ostrowska – Benedetta Panisson – Gloria Pasotti – Sarah Michelle Riisager – Piero Roi – Simone Sapienza – Alberto Singaglia – Enrico Smerilli – Marinos Tsagkarakis – Sybren Vanoverberghe – Karolina Wojtas – Alba Zari – Fani Zguro
In a world spoiled by the grammar of digital communication and the neoliberal production relationships that want everything capable of being shared and consumed faster and faster, the suspicion is growing that photographic language is increasingly losing the ability to report linguistic and postural autonomies, nourishing the impression of an imminent disappearance of the figure of the other and his images and expressions.
This makes a reflection on the work of census, selection, storage and use made by the new emerging research platforms an interesting subject to evaluate and possibly recognize the instances of this suspicion.
By attributing an interest in processing an observation thus proposed, PHROOM exhibits a selection of images from its archives, a choice of authors to each of whom, alongside others, is given the opportunity to report both linguistic autonomy and at the same time the ability to constitute, with his signs, an active part of a choral voice capable of outlining a thematic, disciplinary and aesthetic territory, to which refer as to intercept the most urgent instances of contemporary linguistic expression in the visual field.
THE KENNEL // Demetrio Giacomelli
Office Project Room – Milan, Italy
With the film The Kennel, Demetrio Giacomelli performs a complex operation that sees him simultaneously engaged on two fronts, interrogating the new languages, genres and narratives born within the second digital revolution characterized by the pervasiveness of social networks, and at the same time attempting a story of these characterized by the eclectic and courageous commitment to connect the expressions and results of this neo-scene to a visual-narrative tradition found within a profound and rigorous cinematographic culture.
2020
LOWLANDS // Marco Gobbi, Domenico Antonio Mancini, Piero Roi, Marinos Tsagkarakis
Office Project Room – Milan, Italy
It is difficult to convey the sense of loss that a careful listening to the surrounding and the present makes on the impressions of the landscape around us.
The almost ‘total lack of otherness’ colliding with an ever greater availability of incentives and experiences are only one of the symptoms of an ongoing desertification that, starting from economic malaise and its depressions, invalidates the description and literacy of the world and of its possibilities. Almost that at the end of this interminable negotiation between a humanity increasingly in difficulty and the description of a schizophrenic entertaining with expressions that are never really dissimilar, we will find ourselves living again in the Middle Ages.
Zapping the Archive
Getxo Photo 2020 – Getxo, Spain
223 (Lin Zipeng) – Brandy Eve Allen – Liza Ambrossio – Fabrizio Bellomo – Matteo Cremonesi – Marco Dapino – Giuseppe De Mattia – Irene Fenara – Maria de la O Garrido – Jaakko Kahilaniemi – Seunggu Kim – Yulia Krivich – Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee – Alexandra Lethbridge – Camille Lévêque – Ann Massal – Sergey Melnitchenko – Giovanni Oberti – Eva Ostrowska – Benedetta Panisson – Gloria Pasotti – Sarah Michelle Riisager – Piero Roi – Simone Sapienza – Alberto Singaglia – Enrico Smerilli – Marinos Tsagkarakis – Sybren Vanoverberghe – Karolina Wojtas – Alba Zari – Fani Zguro
In a world spoiled by the grammar of digital communication and the neoliberal production relationships that want everything capable of being shared and consumed faster and faster, the suspicion is growing that photographic language is increasingly losing the ability to report linguistic and postural autonomies, nourishing the impression of an imminent disappearance of the figure of the other and his images and expressions.
This makes a reflection on the work of census, selection, storage and use made by the new emerging research platforms an interesting subject to evaluate and possibly recognize the instances of this suspicion.
By attributing an interest in processing an observation thus proposed, PHROOM exhibits a selection of images from its archives, a choice of authors to each of whom, alongside others, is given the opportunity to report both linguistic autonomy and at the same time the ability to constitute, with his signs, an active part of a choral voice capable of outlining a thematic, disciplinary and aesthetic territory, to which refer as to intercept the most urgent instances of contemporary linguistic expression in the visual field.
DIALOGHI // Fabrizio Bellomo, Peter Fend
Office Project Room – Milan, Italy
The exhibition brings into dialog e the works “Villaggio Cavatrulli” (2010-19) by Fabrizio Bellomo (Bari, 1982) and “Sicilia 1” (2018) by Peter Fend (1950, Columbus, Ohio), granted by the gallery Pinksummer Contemporary Art. Within the series of shows “Dialoghi”, which combines the researches of young artists with the works of established ones, the exhibition project aims to stimulate reflections on their different methodologies, references, influences and less explicit similarities.
The images by Fabrizio Bellomo concern the folds of the Apulian landscape identifying in an architectural archipelago of waste, marked by the exploitation left by the activity of quarrying and extraction of building materials, an opportunity to define a new possible condition of living. ‘Villaggio Cavatrulli”, stretched between an illuminating planning and utopian expression, proposes an environmental view that invites us to modify our ways of experiencing the places we pass through every day, alchemically elaborating a set of tailings architectures, production and valorisation scraps up to the paradigmatic expression of a living otherness.
2019
PHROOM for the Future
Art Stays Festival – Ptuj, Slovenia
Cassandra Klos, Christto & Andrew, Liza Ambrossio, Matteo Cremonesi, Matthieu Gafsou, Marinos Tsakgarakis, Shyue Woon, Synchrodogs, Valentin Fougeray
SLIGHTLY ALTERED // Synchrodogs
Office Project Room – Milan, Italy
Working on ‘Slightly Altered’ project artistic duo Synchrodogs went into a one-month trip across Carpathian Mountains to discover how far people managed to intrude into the territories that were meant to be wild. People have always been shaping natural forces around them. But is there a limit of resources the Earth would allow us to use? “Slightly Altered” is a reflection on how much we are intertwined with nature – changing the environment, we change ourselves. The project is about interdependency of humans and nature and the new ways the Earth begins to look as a result of our interventions into the environmental processes. Over the month of travelling artistic duo had to face a lot of controversial situations: getting to know how thousands of trees are being lumbered by locals weekly, all illegally, for the sake of getting paid, seeing taxidermied animals in every mountain restaurant, hotel or house and never spotting at least one live animal in the forest, stomping out a fire on the mountain valley after some people irresponsibly left a campfire to stop burning by itself. Witnessing these and other intrusions into nature, Synchrodogs have started reflecting upon how much we, like all life, both alter our environment and are altered by it. Creating installations meant to live for a single day and photographing them before they decay, Synchrodogs’ images preserve vistas that are—sadly—likely to be irrevocably altered by the next generation. An abstract reflection on human exploitation of nature, the project is also a visual message about the importance of education – not the one about numerical or verbal literacy but the one that teaches us to appreciate nature and to live our lives with awareness, responsibility, and care.
PARADISO // Liza Ambrossio, Marta Roberti, Ettore Tripodi
Office Project Room – Milan, Italy
“PARADISO” is a group exhibition that sees Ettore Tripodi (Milan, 1985) Liza Ambrossio (Mexico City, 1993) and Marta Roberti (Brescia, 1977) explore the themeof paradise. The authors address and inflect the subject with different narrative attitudes. The artists’ approach to the theme is very distant–diverse expressive practices together with different mediums (drawing, painting, sculpture, photography) restore the complexity of a subject that crosses the history of humanity in aheterogeneous setting, where singular individualities are strengthened through comparison. Ettore Tripodi proposes a narrative in fragments–a series of ten drawings alternating visions of the myth with fragments of a daily paradise; as well as an evocative, eclectic painting that combines forms andstyles of ancient painting with signs belonging to other imaginaries. The same approach is found in the three painted ceramic sculptures, where the shape of the sculpture object dialogues with what is painted above, triggering short circuits and paradoxes.The work proposed by Marta Roberti (part of a series of fourteen works revolving around the sametheme), looks at the historical and anthropological structure of the same subject. It reproduces–with thestrong and characterizing gesture that runs through the artist’s practice–maps of the world of the Commentary on the Apocalypse by the Spanish monk and theologian Saint Beatus of Liébana. The text was written in the eighth century and transcribed and illustrated between the tenth and eleventh centuries. Then there is the approach of Liza Ambrossio. In her work the subject is intercepted within aphotographic practice involving a story that is constantly oscillating between magical symbolism and biographical narrative. It is set in places that a familiar to the artist but read and narrated through a disenchanted, amusing and unnatural perspective. Ambrossio strives to construct an imaginary in which psychology, biology and mysticism are curiously brought into play as a function of a rich and stratified narrative.
From dim to clear to curve // Simona Barbera, Ronny F. Dahl
Office Project Room – Milan, Italy
“From dim to clear to curve” is an installation project created by Simona Barbera and Ronny Faber Dahl for the garden of Office Project Room. In the garden, two modular metal structures make up the main installation, together with fabrics cut in different forms, and a series of stacked sculptures made of composite acrylic, cement, and rubber.
By looking at the shape of different spatial architectures within the city, the installation juxtaposes surfaces that are typically used as deterrents to prevent loitering or any unnecessary holdups in spaces. Barely noticeable hostile surfaces like iron tips and jagged edges on railings, fences, stair sets and benches in places such as banks, shopping streets and official buildings, have become parts of cities’ passageways where they inhibit any irregular usage like skateboarding or sitting by shop windows. Architectures that adopt a minimalist approach have the same infringing function as the more aggressive urban designs, like the vertical leaning benches at bus stops. The installation uses the same modules and “data-sets” of railing designs and further neutralizes them, dispelling their hostile nature by turning them into sculptures that offhandedly reduce them to their bare form which, in turn, blends in with the fenced-in urban garden surroundings as a free-standing scaffold. A hand-sewn piece of cloth is wrapped around the rail, uncovering a pattern made from algorithmic computing processes of interrupted graphics. An array of hues varying from smog-color greens, to grays and purples, along with automated industrial metals resonate with our tactile memory of passing through, while all shapes become ultimately suggestive of a digitally generated composition. By recognizing the ambiguity between public urban planning and private property protection, the altered forms question the ability of designs in the commons to function as a structural grid in which bodies are blocked or moved. Because of their intrinsic duality of supposed intended function/message-in-form, these given designs fade as, the moment someone impulsively sits on top of the edge of a leaning bench, no more intention is present. Like looking past an advertising display, shifting the clear gaze and staring into the distance, which becomes curved into only mere colors and shapes.
DIALOGHI // Matteo Cremonesi, Bruno Muzzolini
Office Project Room – Milan, Italy
The works presented by Bruno Muzzolini and Matteo Cremonesi are characterized by a strongly authorial practice that sees the artists engaged in a linguistic refection that finds, starting from the interrogation of the language and its disposition, the signs necessary to outline a territory of dialogue.
By entrusting the works with the possibility of reporting each argument, the two authors discuss the complex relationship that affects the postural limits of language – linguistic device, finding for these a form of action in which, despite the formal differences proposed by the two kinds of research, it is possible to intercept for both the terms of a query that finds its focus in the search for a listening of the gaze and its modus operandi.
PHROOM x Odesa Photo Days
Odesa Photo Days – Odessa, Ukraine
Yatender – Éva Ostrowska – Yoshikazu Aizawa – Brandy Eve Allen – Cassandra Klos – Tsagkarakis Marinos – Fabrizio Bellomo – Christian Michael Filardo – Demetrio Giacomelli – Gloria Romanovich – Nora Lowinsky – Iva Kontic – Seunggu Kim – Sybren Vanoverberghe – Maria Mavropoulou – Piero Roi – Liza Ambrossio – Alexandra Lethbridge – Christto Andrew – Ginevra Shay – Jaya Pelupessy – Giovanni Oberti – Enrico Smerilli – Valentin Fougeray – Matteo Cremonesi – Simone Bergantini – Alberto Sinigaglia – Bruno Muzzolini – Fani Zguro – Mauro Folci
2018
DIALOGHI // Demetrio Giacomelli, Mauro Folci
Office Project Room – Milan, Italy
The performative actions of Mauro Folci and Demetrio Giacomelli dissolve each other in a continuity of images and suggestions, where the liminal reflections on history and on cinema act as a guide between the rubble of personal memory and even before that of a suprapersonal one. A succession of images between reality and fiction, flow of consciousness where the monologue, the inner voice, holds the fragments of the discourse on
historical time and on the cinematographic image beyond the screen and the representation.
The proposed actions offer through irony and jokes the necessary distance so that the public can experience on a dialectical plane the becoming of performative action.
DIALOGHI // Francesco Fonassi, Lucio Fontana
Office Project Room – Milan, Italy
Francesco Fonassi establishes a close dialogue with ‘Concetto spaziale, ovale’ by Lucio Fontana, a ceramic piece made in 1968. Secondo distretto– the core of the presented works – arises from a perpetual interest in the development of war technology and its derivations, the techniques and methods of shooting and diffusion of sound in space and the falsified, popular panorama of the so-called pseudosciences, in a relationship between the body, mind and architecture that is almost never balanced.
Instances such assender-receiver,shield, inset, barrier, andsensory leakage are revealed in a configuration of synthesis as forms and prototype forces. Fonassi starts a model reduction path, imagining an urbanised district where buildings are designed to bring the inhabitants together according to experimental and dissociated practices, typical of psycho-physics, acoustic persistence and radiophony. An array of scalable, rational and mental devices and infrastructures.
2016
And there was evening and there was morning // Simona Andrioletti
T14 Contemporary – Milan, Italy
“So it was evening, then it was morning: and it was the first day.” How does the beginning of everything look like? That eternal energy that generated the first beginning, the early morning of all time, for Simona has to do with an explosion: the fire, linked to the Latin verb foveo and to the Greek words φῶς (phos), light. Imploded energy, the Genesis of all moments.
It is with one of the simplest destruction tools, the Molotov bomb, that the artist opens her personal exhibition, where an explosion accompanies us on a journey that with great delicacy investigates the boundaries of human exploration, in its higher sense.
That man who wants to know, measure, ennoble. How much space does the highest point of the Earth occupy? “I asked Silvio Mondinelli, the sixth mountaineer in the world to have climbed all fourteen of the eight-thousand of the Himalayan chain, (without the help of oxygen) to recover through memory the space of the summit of Everest. He traced its perimeter in 1: 1 scale on a piece of paper” says Simona. This perimeter was used as a template to create a marble base, where Silvio Mondinelli’s signs and writings make that memory immortal in the most faithful way possible. In that memory, Francesco Šljiva Venturi gives life to a primordial sound that once again seeks a point of contact with the origin, through the use of his voice and a single instrument: a shamanic drum, purpose-built by a craftsman for the performance.
He will climb “on the top of Mount Everest” to sing a variation of Ives’ Unanswered Question, in the lowest possible pitch. It is the elaboration of an impossibility: to go as high as possible while going as low as possible.
UR-NA // Danilo Vuolo
T14 Contemporary – Milan, Italy
Ur-na is the mysterious echo of language. It is an ode to something unspeakable, that moves in the ravines of everyday life, confusing itself in the flow of events. Uri-na precedes the search for a sense, a determination, a body. It’s a shade between shadow and transparency. It is a frequency to listen to the simple existence of a glass, of a hand, of a gesture.
UR-NA is what Luis Carroll defines a portmanteau word, a neologism deriving from the fusion of two different terms: “UR” a powerful and rare German prefix that indicates what is primitive, and “NĀ” Indo-European term that indicates the flow of water understood as a denial of the act of seeing.
With these ancient Indo-European peoples, the idea of negation arose from the experience of the darkness of the nocturnal waters. In those times, it was believed that the dark hours of the night were caused by the end of the period of motion of the bright daytime ocean, and the subsequent coming around the ocean floor of dark waters. So, during the night to the question “What do you see?”, the answer could only be “One sees only NĀ” and that is water, equivalent to seeing nothing. (from the critical text of: Elisabetta Rastelli)
The series of works presented by Danilo Vuolo, are in fact shadow scripts, in which the artist contrasts his natural transparency due to the presence of water and emphasizes the use of different vitreous objects. That of Danilo Vuolo is a reflection on language that, in a moment of information overload, aims at the potential of the “unspoken”, a notion with a long history of reflections behind it and that becomes here sensorial and imaginative stimulus.
Trust Magnum // Younes Klouche
T14 Contemporary – Milan, Italy
In central Switzerland, international companies enjoy tax privileges and set offices in large buildings just like those of The City in London. The managers and employees roam the streets of a small village in german convertibles or running clothes at lunchtime.
The management and research division of these companies is based in Switzerland but the production take place in developing countries, nations that own valuable materials at cheap price. The only small thing is that operating in such a kind of places they can easily evade from respect human and environment rights. Glencore for instance is a giant wholesaler and mineral extractor based in Baar, is one of the biggest commercial company in the world, in 2010 they owned the 60% of the zinc global market, 50% of the copper mines of the and 3% of the petrol infrastructures. We can say that Glencore own worldwide oil, mineral and natural gas facilities as well as food industries. The accusation on Glencore are heavy, the work conditions of the employees are unacceptable based on the western world standards, without mention the negative impact on the local communities and on the environment.
The work of Younès Klouche not pretend to judge those dynamics, or using images as a tool of complaint of a ethically questionable legacy, handed down from company to company. The artist gives us the access inside of this tax free heaven, absorbed in one of the most beautiful landscape of the entire nation.
With no privileged access on site, central Switzerland allowed Younès Klouche to observe what makes no uproar, spy the discrete practices of traders hide inside dark and shiny buildings that hits also the less attentive watch. As spooky postcards, made with sharpen and rigid elegance, the images of Younès Klouche are almost violent and creates an aesthetics experience that leave the observer frozen. An intangible cold that deals with the distance, the untouchability of a world that remains closed in a inscrutable bubble of glass.
UNDERTOW, memories of an american journey // Mara Palena
T14 Contemporary – Milan, Italy
Undertow is the english term that describes the process whereby an underwater current flows strongly away from the coast taking with it everything it touches. Undertow, just like the water current, brings back the memories of a journey that belongs to the road. Projected in the midst of extraordinary nature these roads murmur so many stories lost between the natural colours of the day and the artificial lights of an American night. The undertow doesn’t just allude to water, this phenomenon can also allude to a vice hardto escape from or a feeling that you cannot shake. Fascinated by the modern world, tourism and sub-culture, the artist addresses herself to what is known as the sub-genre of photo-reportage: Street Photography.
Bruce Gilden once said: “If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it’s a street photograph.”.
In Mara’s shots the smell of the street is filtered by a tender look and evokes unexpected memories.
Modus Operandi
Ex Fornace – Milan, Italy
The exhibition borns with the intention of opening an overview of art photography and contemporary painting in Italy. 30 artists are called upon to give voice to a precise moment: a reconnaissance that finds its expression in a dialogue that over the years has always taken on the tones of debate: the relationship between photography and painting.
In the past, the ‘new technique’ was used by all painters as a mnemonic support for their works: to investigate chiaroscuro and the many varieties of light and shade, to draw new inspiration, to tackle a study or to get a preview of the work. Throughout its history, photography has been suggested as a useful aid, a substitute for drawing in the observation of reality.
Artists and critics have always commented on the aesthetic value and the limits of its “imitation”, sometimes arbitrarily circumscribing its boundaries.
2015
Luck doesn’t exist // Urs Luthi, Maria de la O Garrido
T14 Contemporary – Milan, Italy
Considered one of the leading exponents of European conceptual art, Urs Lüthi has experimented throughout his career all forms of artistic representation: from the famous self-portraits of the ’70s, to painting, to sculpture and installations, always passing with coherence through a dialogue with his eclectic alter-ego. Using self-representation as a capacity to become a spectator of oneself. The depth of Urs Lüthi’s reflection lies precisely in this dualism between solemnity and irony, poised between comedy and tragedy, on the senselessness of existence.
Humor, dressed in irony, biting criticism, sometimes blatant and not lacking in visual talent, has always been present in the history of art, but today the extension of reference frameworks, such as the use of new media, in particular, photography and video have widened the possibilities for a more direct expression of all those suggestions, even useless or sometimes negative, that we perceive on a daily basis, progressively contributing to transforming humor into a true narrative element.
The work of Maria de La O Garrido collects traces of life, scattered here and there between real memories and impossible constructions of an actual reality. He works with the image in a completely original way, through the use of various photographic means and not: collages, drawings, recovered images and objects, using these mediums as a tool to build a sort of eternal composition of suggestions and discoveries. The imagery created by Maria is a selection of elements, taken from an infinite spectrum of places and possibilities, then juxtaposing them, contextualizing them and realigning them giving them a new meaning.
There must be more life than this // Anthony Gerace
T14 Contemporary – Milan, Italy
There Must Be More to Life Than This is a project started in summer 2011, but the artist said its origins can be traced back to 2009 in a series of posters and album packages. Collage, photographs, and typography are the three main elements of his work.
Some chromatic collages are formed by cut-outs of the pages of a vintage magazine belonging to his life, other artworks by the photographs of people or advertisements. Portraits shot on colored backgrounds and used for magazine covers become abstract formal experiments hinting to what’s missing in the image: the loss of the person’s figure, carefully taken out of context, as that context folds in on itself. In other pieces, the absence of the parts is predominant, and what is left is only some lines and edges, holding together the geometrical traces of a profile.
In Anthony’s artworks, the absence is what forms the image, creating an enchanting aura of mystery and immortality.
Another Lonely Night // SNUFF
T14 Contemporary – Milan, Italy
Highlighting the disappearance and the mixture of visual languages, the artworks produced by SNUFF collective focus on the experimentation and the research of new routes for language and aesthetics. Moreover, they question the visual habits of contemporary society, used to this mixture between images and genres, and thus ever-more unable to focus on the single element that constitutes the image itself. The group’s tendency to question society’s habits makes this project a perfect fit for T14’s line of thought, always searching for the most contemporary art practices.
AMERICAN/LATINA/JAPANESE LANDSCAPE, is a project by SNUFF collective (Matteo Cremonesi and Enrico Smerilli) made up of three photographic series obtained from cut-outs of pornographic pictures taken from the Internet. These images gather information about environments, forms and spaces, exasperating their features. Scenarios become objects capable of putting on focus different aspects of the environments in which the pornographic body lives in its various cultural perspectives.
The physicality and history of a place and the presence-absence of the elements are captured in their spontaneous structure. The attention is constantly obstructed, due to the peculiar framing and the continuous omission of human subjects. The observer is thus forced to focus on new elements that, as a whole, constitute another visual subject.