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GALLERIA CONTINUA San Gimignano: KADER ATTIA, DANIEL BUREN, LORIS CECCHINI, HANS OP DE BEECK - 6 June 2010 to 6 Sept 2010 Current Exhibition |
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KADER ATTIA Holy Land, 2007 Courtesy of the artist,
1st Biennale of the Canary Islands. Photo Kader Attia |
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GALLERIACONTINUA / San Gimignano inaugurazione | opening domenica 6 giugno 2010 | Sunday 6 June 2010 dalle 11 alle 18 | from 11 am to 6 pm KADER ATTIA Holy Land DANIEL BUREN Circa il ritorno di una svolta lavoro situato, versione IV, giugno 2010 LORIS CECCHINI Solidsky HANS OP DE BEECK Still Lifes KADER ATTIA Holy Land Galleria Continua is pleased to present Holy Land, the first solo exhibition in San Gimignano by the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia. Internationally regarded as one of the most significant young artists on the contemporary art scene, Attia has already showed his work in important art institutions in Spain, Germany, Mexico, Sweden, America, England and, in France, at the Palais de Tokyo and the Mus�e d'art contemporain de Lyon and the Centre Georges Pompidou. Attia has always been interested in the dynamics governing relations between the East and West of the world, and the conflicts of identity arising from a multiethnic and globalized world. Taking the plurality of his own cultural background as a point of departure, Attia focuses on the complex relationship between Europe and immigration, analysing a series of historic and contemporary issues, ranging from French colonial policies to a comparison between North African culture � uprooted from its context of origin � and the seductive consumer culture embraced by the West. Completely grounded in this duality, the artist�s work reflects the difficulties and sense of failure stemming from the lack of integration. Attia affirms the value of difference. Employing various media � photography, video, installation, often rendered with a symbolic language and a minimal aesthetics � the artist investigates the concept of diversity, whether cultural or religious, sexual or socio-political. His works explore the tensions, traumas and fears inherent to our society. At the Galleria Continua Attia is showing an installation in the garden � Holy Land, which is also the title of the exhibition � and a new work, Open your Eyes, a double projection of slides installed in the gallery�s tower space. Holy Land has been installed in the gallery�s garden: 21 mirrors looking out onto the Tuscan countryside, transforming the space into an �ephemeral architecture�, into a place that invites us to dwell upon memory and history. Attia comments: �This work is a reflection, from a political, philosophical and psychoanalytic point of view, on the real desire to immigrate.� The artist�s mirrors, the form of which ultimately also recall gravestones, reflect the image of a globalized world that has lost its cultural identity, and in which the identity of the individual is subjected to the laws of consumption and standardization. Attia often quotes ironically Ren� Descartes in his: "I consume so I am". Open your Eyes (2010) lies somewhere between the story of a personal experience and history. The installation consists of a series of archive images projected one after another, and taken by the artist during a sojourn in Congo, and subsequently in the gallery spaces of museums in America and Belgium. The work gives artistic expression to an urgency that Attia considers to be of primary importance � the need for cultural reappropriation. What the artist creates is a comparison between two different ways of conceiving of aesthetics and ethics: that of the Western world, based on the myth of perfection and symmetry, and that of the non-Western worlds, such as Africa, but also India and Latin America, which uphold the idea of functionality and from which another aesthics could be read. �I have created this slide show with the aim of separating, repairing, reappropriating� the goal is to reveal that in the cultural gap between the North and South of the world there exists the possibility/impossibility of a dialogue, on the one hand, between Modernity and tradition, and on the other hand, between the legacy of �the Age of Reason� and the archeology of the language of the repaired body. Far from the myth of perfection, art is perhaps the only thing capable of giving sense to the non-sense of the relation between the perfection of aesthetic surgery and broken objects of everyday life. Maybe this space between these two opposite sides will be, one day, defined and considered by the Human mind. This act of considering this space between the Occidental Thought and the Non-Occidental one, will work, for both sides, as reappropriation. Reappropriation is actually an endless process of exchanges bewteen cultures, as a loop...�. DANIEL BUREN Circa il ritorno di una svolta - Iscrizioni lavoro situato, versione IV, giugno 2010 Daniel Buren is returning to the Galleria Continua in San Gimignano with a show entitled Circa il ritorno di una svolta - Iscrizioni, lavoro situato, versione IV, giugno 2010. An artist of international renown, Buren is one of the leading exponents of the neo-avant-garde art movements of the late 60s and the 70s. Having availed himself of an invariable �visual instrument� � alternating white and coloured vertical stripes 8.7 cm wide �, for over 40 years the artist has investigated the relations between the art work, the place where it takes shape and the viewer. The discarding of traditional artistic practices, the definitive abandonment of figuration in favour of abstraction, and a conceptual approach are predominant features of Buren�s work. The artist�s practice centres on the desire to undermine given models through the multiplication of points of view, and to upset perspectives by means of visual interference. Buren�s work offers a critical reading of the art object, dealing with issues relating to the visibility of the work and the definition of its status. To piece together the history of Circa il ritorno di una svolta - Iscrizioni, lavoro situato, versione IV, giugno 2010, it is necessary to go back to 1985-86, when Buren conceived a permanent work for the courtyard of the Palais-Royal in Paris. Entitled Les Deux Plateaux, it consists of a series of polygonal columns arranged in an area of 3,000 square metres. During the construction phase there was heated debate about Buren�s intervention and about the concept of integrating ancient and contemporary art. Passers-by, who the artist deliberately chose not to deny a view of the site by erecting a perimeter barrier that was only waist high, contributed to the querelle by writing their comments on the outside of the fence. In the 1988 exhibition at Le Magasin in Grenoble, Autour du retour d�un d�tour � Inscriptions, Buren used the old fencing of the site to create a path that reproduced that of the Palais-Royal. The only way visitors could access the galleries was via a corridor, which in turn defined an inner portion of the work. On the outer side of the fence, the one delineating the walkway, it was possible to read what the passers-by wrote; on the inner side, there were contrasting red and white stripes. Buren has chosen the stalls area of the Galleria Continua to present, in situ, Autour du retour d�un d�tour � Inscriptions, which in this new context has become Circa il ritorno di una svolta - Iscrizioni, lavoro situato, versione IV, giugno 2010. Daniel Buren was born in Boulogne-Billancourt (Paris) on 25.03.38. He lives and works in situ. LORIS CECCHINI Solidsky After Dotsandloops, the extraordinary retrospective exhibition held at the Luigi Pecci Contemporary Art Centre in Prato, Italy, and at the MAM Mus�e d'Art Moderne di Saint-�tienne in France, Loris Cecchini is returning to Galleria Continua in San Gimignano with Solidsky, a solo exhibition comprising previously unshown projects and new cycles of works in which heterogeneous elements alternate in a poetics of design and of physical and virtual matter. Solidsky conjures up poetic echoes, leaving the collection of memory-triggering images open to a range of interpretations. There is mention of the solid sky in the Old Testament, a revolving dome resting on pillars and containing the sun, moon and stars. For the new generations Solid Sky is synonymous with experimental electronic music, while for Cecchini it is also the brand of one of the materials he uses. The meaning of Solidsky should be sought not so much in the dense mesh of the semantic stratification but in the interpretation of multiple forms of visualization, where the construction of different levels of reality generates fluctuating morphologies, suspended in the solid and evanescent dimension of Cecchini�s artistic idiom. Solidsky presents a world in limbo between biographical narration and artifice. The works shown by Cecchini investigate matter, both physical and metaphysical; they speak to us about the nature of materials, of nature in a poetic and organic, biological and molecular sense. As the artist explains, in these works �fragments of nature alternate with the elaboration of the project matter, in a continual reference to nature and architectural structures, in a kind of expressive osmosis in which matter and materials are abstracted in order to become pure presence, pure sensible matter, an osmotic technology-nature relationship�. The behaviour of waves, vibrations and other physical phenomena are the suggestive elements underlying a number of previously unshown Gaps, resin casts that protrude from the gallery walls and which, as unexpected variations of the architectural surface, create visual short circuits. The theme of dwelling, of architecture as spatial and formal project planning, as a container, as place, comes together in the new Rainbows Trusses cycle. These are structures/sculptures capable of inflecting nature and artifice in minimal forms of landscape, prompting us to reflect upon the concept of representation, of sculpture, of levels of reality, of the transformation of matter. Portions of arches, beams and trusses acquire evanescence in the transparency of Plexiglas and polycarbonate, splinters of architecture are dematerialized in the play of light passing through the matter. Inside there are natural elements � sponges, pieces of coral, organic and morphological forms, primitive nuclei that reference both the mutation and the reformulation of private memories � and also bushes, logs and branches of ivy made from cast bronze or brass. Cecchini�s propensity for poetically elaborating spatial reality and matter can also be found in the new cycle entitled The Polychromesandsessions: geometric fields of colour embedded in architectural fragments. In these works the minimal and rigorous aesthetics of the structure come together with the warm, emotive and familiar element of sand, which, mixed with pure pigment, extends like a fresco over the wall, in a succession of shades and layers. Through a process of rediscovery and abstraction, the artist appropriates the unrepeatable gesture of painting. The use of sand, furthermore, evokes a series of other images: the sand present in the structural morphology of coral, sand as a basic element in building construction, but also silicon in the production of electronic chips, and, again, sand marking the passage of time in an hourglass. Construction and measure, configuration and functioning, design and stratification are the terms around which The Arbitary Rules are developed. These are devoted to the idea of continual measurement and to analog design tools: here too diagrams of landscape and graphically schematized elements, reelaborations of goniometers, rulers and set squares, overlap in abstract compositions in which the investigation becomes suspended and fluctuating, in a continuum that reworks forms and modes of cognitive process, in a kind of investigation lying somewhere between scientific display and the freedom of the creative process. Cecchini�s interest in technics and in investigating the most extreme boundaries of technology and computer science lie at the heart of the interactive installation realized in collaboration with the engineer Stefano Coluccini and Stack! Studios. This work, which is receiving its first ever preview in Solidsky, is the result of a long period of research and of sophisticated applied technologies capable of linking the natural element of water and the lunar cycles with the virtual world and that of artificial intelligence. The viewer�s physical presence alters and modifies the state of the work, producing chromatic variations and activating a continual flux of matter which is unexpectedly rapid and crystalline rather than slow and dense. HANS OP DE BEECK Still Lifes The new solo exhibition by the Belgian multi-disciplinary artist comprises a series of sculptures and a video work. Still Lifes is a new, ongoing series of sculpted tables each of which consists of a number of objects brought together in an associative manner. Sculptural, life-sized interpretations of everyday objects such a piece of fruit, a bottle, a book, a cup of coffee, a pack of cigarettes or a trio of dice are combined with objects on a reduced scale, such as furniture pieces or small models of fictitious architectural forms. The tabletop is used as a small stage, a platform on which small, silent, intimate worlds are created. These table sculptures, all executed in the same monochrome grey synthetic gypsum, refer to our daily life as well as to the heritage and the tradition of painting. The collections of objects at different scales are reminiscent of for example the Renaissance Wunderkammer, the silence of Giorgio Morandi's still lifes or the associative compositions and questioning of the status of the real and the represented by Ren� Magritte. Because of the use of the grey gypsum also Pompeii and the archeological object come to mind. The video work Staging Silence (2009) is based around abstract, archetypal settings that lingered in the memory of the artist as the common denominator of the many similar public places he has experienced. The video images themselves are both ridiculous and serious, just like the eclectic mix of pictures in our minds. The decision to film in black and white heightens this ambiguity: the improvised nature of the video invokes the legacy of slapstick, as well as the insidious suspense and latent derailment of film noir. The title refers to the staging of such dormant decors where, in the absence of people, the spectator can project himself as the lone protagonist. Memory images are disproportionate mixtures of concrete information and fantasies, and in this film they materialize before the spectator. |
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