January 27 / 31, 2011
Hall 18 Stand D 37 - C 40
Fabio Paris Art Gallery is proud to announce it is taking part in ArteFiera 2011, in the context of a group shop organised by the association Glow Platform, an international network of contemporary galleries.
For the exhibition project, entitled “Alla ricerca dell'uomo contemporaneo. Autoritratti” (“In Search of Contemporary Man. Self portraits”) the gallery will present the work of five international artists: the collective Alterazioni Video (IT /US), the Italians Tonylight and Stefano Capuzzi, the Dutch artist Rosa Menkman and the Canadian Jon Rafman.
Alterazioni Video will present a selection of their recent Violent Paintings (2010), a series of images collectively processed on the web in a continuing process of exchange and digital manipulation. The Violent Paintings testify to the ongoing creation of a shared lexicon, the result of a dialogue between five individuals who no longer have anything to say to each other but continue to feel the pressing need to communicate. The violence in question varies from that unleashed in the heated exchanges between the members of the group, to the content of the images themselves, images which are then transferred onto a medium, a light PVC which is bent and deformed, to attacks on the classic genre of painting, parodied by appropriation and amateurish Photoshop effects, or lastly the violence the images inflict on the spectator, who is challenged to make sense of this mish-mash of amateur photos, porn, hentai graphics, second-rate effects and art classics.
Tonylight tackles the self portrait in one of his recent SpaceLED works (2010), small screens assembled by the artist comprising a grid of 192 white LEDs controlled by a microprocessor. These screens are used to display a series of images from 8bit videogame cartridges such as Space Invaders, and various personalised animations inspired by the world of videogames. These allude to the dawn of the era of digital media, in which the “first electronic sparks” struck our imagination, leaving a permanent legacy of images, aesthetics and colours that we now regard with fond nostalgia.
The portrait of contemporary man is not to be sought in his face but in his imagination, gathering the objects he is drawn to, recounting his real or virtual journeys. This is what Stefano Capuzzi does in his recent sculptures, artificial “flowers” that he creates by mounting, in some of the infinite possible combinations, sheets of polycarbonate cut into three different formats created by deforming a single shape and hand-painted in bright colours. Stunning and perverse, these “flowers” are a further outcome of Capuzzi’s interest in combinatory art and his detached dialogue with minimalism. Only apparently contradicted, this fundamental chapter in contemporary sculpture is a necessary reference for Capuzzi, with its work on seriality (Sol LeWitt) and the “antiformalist” nature of folds (Robert Morris), which reintroduces elements of complexity into order, and the unpredictability of the organic world into the geometry of the inorganic.
Among the revelations of the latest international photography festival in Rome, Fotografia, Jon Rafman presents two recent videos. Woods of Arcady (2010) illustrates a bucolic poem by William Butler Yeats with views taken from virtual worlds, telling of a world without humans and inhabited by huge statues and historic ruins, as if superimposing two equally “artificial” visions of man’s history. In You, the World and I (2010) an anonymous narrator travels around Google Earth and Google Street View in search of a lost love. Is it still possible to vanish without a trace in a world where everything is recorded and documented?
The face of the artist makes an unexpected return in the video work of Rosa Menkman, who explores the aesthetics of the glitch: visualisation and compression errors that are becoming increasingly common in the age of digital images, but that Menkman investigates with original experimental rigour, making them into metaphors for other failures, those which complicate human communication.
