Jordan Wolfson 'Con Leche'_Johann König Gallery, Berlin

Jordan Wolfson, 'Con Leche' screenshot,  courtesy Johann König Gallery, Berlin

«Mass is all that does not value himself - good or for evil - by special reasons, but feels" like the whole world, "and yet did not distress, and indeed feels at ease in recognizing identical to more»
(Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses)   

Jordan Wolfson, american artist who lives between New York and Berlin, presents for his second solo show at Johann König Gallery in Berlin a video-animation entitled 'Con Leche'. The film, which lasts about 15 minutes, consists of images with an audio record of a dialogue between the artist and an actress who reads a text written by Wolfson: excerpts of stories, events, news and personal memories of mass society, of capitalism abounds.

The video, in loop mood, is projected on the wall in the large room in front of the entrance of the gallery space. It shows a hybrid image, which consists of a documentary of the desolate streets of Detroit, which overlaps the outline drawn and digital animation of a bottle of 'Diet-Coke' with small legs and feet, unexpectedly filled to the brim with milk and not as expected, the soft drink Coca-Cola. The cartoon plays the strategy of advertisement. In the video, the 'Diet-Coke' with milk goes through the streets of Detroit, joining other bottles like her. All together they form a small indistinct multitude armed. The bottles move together and indifferent, identical in form and movement, on the background photograph of the real landscape of the city.

The frame of the image, for the duration of the film, is altered through a series of special effects, produced by the projection. The picture slides from a perspective to different directions to adjust, yields on one hand, oscillates, is upturned.

The small army of bottles of milk are marching together without a specific direction. They do not know what his goal, if there is one, or if thay have a particular goal. The 'Diet-Coke' milk, which recall the traditional bottles of milk, show the ambiguity of a figure at once reassuring and disturbing. At they same time thay are a status symbol of mass society, but indeed they are the sign of this contemporary decadence.

In the background you hear the female voice of an actress playing a text consisting of parts that describe the mass society. The story recalls a stream of consciousness, woven cover story, interviews, diaries and personal confessions. Wolfson is pursuing a multi-media narrative that recalls the passage of information through the Web, with images of fashion models on the covers of cocaine-gossip magazine, the sense of insecurity and inadequacy that accompanies the artist against his life, and especially his role and responsibility in society, even more so, today, where violence is rampant and fear; to explain how deep mass society controls our behavior, there is the interview of a young homosexual who’s constricted to hide is sexual tendency because of the influence of his parents. They are so involved in the life of the boy up to upheaval in the deep, in the most intimate sphere of the emotions and feelings, as told by the guy who out of fear of combat, his family was resigned to marry a woman.

The actress is periodically interrupted by the voice of the artist, who explains how she has low tone tune and modulate the voice, to read this story. In this way, Wolfson is involved in the reproduction of his own text, exercising a form of control over the voice of women in the same way in which images of the animated movie incite the viewer in his subconscious mind to question the role of the individual in mass society, reduced almost to an hypnosis  state. As in the Pink Floyd’s movie 'The Wall' (1982), where in 'Another Brick in the Wall' the images and the reality merge and transform each other.

The film splits within his own reproduction, made by two parts: a speech and imagies. These two elements are decomposed: the visual image splits in a film documentary, the streets of Detroit, and a digital animation cartoon. The designs, similar to an advertisement in reverse - the subliminal message here is not trying to incite anything, but confuses the viewer -  could recall some pictures of the Disney cartoons.

Wolfson, who manipulates contemporary elements that belong to the collective imagination, increases the complexity of the fruition of the work. Using a medium that is similar to that advertising leads the viewer's attention is driven to raise the level of learning and understanding.
In particular, it could remind the story of 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' in the movie 'Fantasia' (1940), in which Mickey Mouse was in inappropriately dominate and control an army of bewitched and bad brooms.
But going deeper, the film could remind another oldest tale, known as 'The Piper of Hamelin' or 'The Pied Piper'. The legend, as told by Grimm brothers, is taken from an accident happened truely. The story tells of an invasion of rats at Hamelin, in Lower Saxony, at the end of 1200. One day a stranger came to the town and promises to de-tick. The mayor agrees, promising an adequate payment. As soon as the Pied Piper began playing the magic flute, the rats are enchanted by his music and bring to follow him, leaving lead up to the waters of the river Weser, where thay drown.
The inhabitants of the city, now free from rats, ungrateful, decide not to pay the Pied Piper. So,  for revenge, the Pied Piper resumed playing while the adults are in the church, attracting behind all the children of the city. 130 children follow him spellbound in open countryside, where the Pied locked them up in a cave. At this point there are different versions. In the most, no child does not survive, or even if only one saves, that lame, failed to keep speed as his companions. Then there is the latest final introducing a happy ending, in which a child of Hamelin, escaped abduction by the Pied Piper, and he manages to free their comrades.

Jordan Wolfson 'Con Leche'
Johann König Gallery
Dessauer Straße 6-7
10963 Berlin
T: +49.30.2610 308-0
F: +49.30.2610 308-11
Email: info@johannkoenig.de
Website: www.johannkoenig.de

Since November 24th, 2009 until January 9th, 2010

The gallery will be closed from 21 December 2009 to January 3, 2010

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Artworks in the New Technology's era

 

 

Giuseppe Penone
".....TRA ....."
Partial  view  of the show

October 2009
Courtesy Galleria Alfonso Artiaco, Naples

                                    

Marisa Argentato Pasquale Pennacchio 
"The Great White Hope", 2009
mixed media, 560x400x280 cm 
Photos Polly Braden
Courtesy T293, Naples            

Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi, in inner homine habitat veritas

(St. Augustine)

"Do you know what that sign says? - The Latin phrase 'Temet Nosce', written on a wooden panel - "Know thyself." I want to tell you a little secret: being the Chosen One is like being in love. No one can tell if you're in love, only you know. You know it by instinct. " Thus, in "Matrix" the movie, the Oracle explains to Neo what being the Chosen One in a world made of images specious deceptive. Neo is pulled into a dimension where the intensity of the perceptions and the psychological and emotional reactions, resulting from the events, do not correspond to a horizon-fledged reality. A little as it is today, in front of the TV. The suggestion is the medium through which this operation takes place which leads to confusion between reality and imagination. New technologies has changed our every day life by creating alternative learning opportunities and transforming the human mind. Art as artifice develops a parallel path to the spread of these new cognitive mode.  A fake that perfectly mimics real life.

A sort of deja veux - society of the spectacle that mix reality and fiction up continuously.  This issue has prompted me to combine the research of some artists who, in different ways, describe an evolution in this direction. As in a virtual exhibition, I try to identify  the texture which defines the classic epistemological dualism of Western philosophy between 'noumenon', or thing in itself, and 'phenomenon'. From Kant, this issue has produced a slow and irreversible impairment of an ontological system. A process that in Schopenhauer’s vision put the existence of the world in a deep relation with its representation. The only way to grasp the truth and to reach the noumenal being, is to go deep inside human mind. This is the only way to discover another dimension of man and the world: the will. The self-analysis from human person is a way to capture the essence of things, even to create it.

Giuseppe Penone’s artworks (Garessio, 3 April 1947, lives and works in Turin) are full of this idea. In the exhibition "... Tra ..." ( …between…) designed for Alfonso Artiaco gallery in Naples, the artist presented a bronze installation, that imitate a pine tree’ trunk split in half. Probably struck by lightning or broken by its very top. The trunk is raised from the floor by a parallel structure. The flu-like trunk is broken in the center and upright to the fracture, on the gray platform that supports the work, are carved some prints, superimposed on each other. Similar to the wrinkles on the bark of the tree, this prints identify the traces of passing time. The relationship between man and technology is at the heart of the poetics of the artist. From this it opens the infinite possibilities of man and his destiny.

thought among others,

between earth and heaven,

between day and night,

between ear and ear,

between the feet and hair,

between white and black,

between twowalls.

So Giuseppe Penone writes. Pendant the installation, two large panels are shown to reproduce the bark’ s surface, charcoal plant. A track that repeats identical to itself and yet unique at the same time. Similar to fingerprints they mark the life or the fate of a man. Human action in a real dimension is mediated by technology. A strong, radical and subtle battle.

This intervention becomes a part of the reality in the work of Hany Armanious (Egypt, 1962, lives and works in Sydney, Australia), presented for the first time in Italy at the Galleria Raucci / Santamaria in Naples. The artist created sculptures in resin that reproduce every detail of real objects. False indistinguishable to the eye, even expert.

Everything is fake: the painted white in the back, the table with the sponge, polystyrene foam and the stone of quartz, bamboo, the table covered with sawdust. But the reaction that causes into the viewer’s mind is true. The feeling that objects give is more convincing than the material. In this misinterpretation is jumped any distinction between noumenon, thing or concept in itself, and the thing as it looks like, perception of perception.

The Truth is replaced by a new reality that coincides with the continuous learning of it. The compositions, generated by an array surrealist, are Vanitas made of elements that seem worn by time, formally unconnected. In the exhibition at the gallery in Naples are shown combinations that match together objects in resin blend-is to be said! – with some others in silver: a silver foil ball that seems stuck to the fake mustache and bamboo cane.

The Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone (Berne, Switzerland, 1964, lives and works in New York), pursues the complex relationship between reality and fiction. Sculptures lead imitate fruits, wooden doors, routes and time-worn pieces of white polystyrene. Lead substitute material that originally density are radically different. The process of Rondinone, unlike in Armanious, takes place in opposition dialectic. Heaviness and lightness, order and disorder are opposites that attract inevitably, in a process that inscribes the book into a metaphysical horizon. The essence of time is the limit concept that Rondinone seeks to capture in his works, while in the work of Armanious things flow naturally.

But the path of art is not like any other method of knowing. Tends not only to the truth, but directly to it. Artistic research conceptual matrix operates on a horizon that concerns the context in which the work is implemented and its standardization.

Marisa Argentato (Naples, 1977) & Pasquale Pennacchio (Caserta, 1979) - live and work between Naples and Frankfurt - made the stand of the gallery that represents them T293 of Naples, on the occasion of 2009 edition of the international fair of contemporary art Frieze in London. "The Great White Hope" was the stand: completely empty, white and deserted is a place of transition. The space emptied of all goods from the beginning of the fair disorienting. In fact the site coincides with the work of art. The content and the container are in harmony, but in a place assigned for the exchange and trade opens a new possibility for the horizon of contemporary art. It’s an experiment on the re-dimensioning of places for art. Parameters and predetermined roles change within the context of use of the work. So, we could find a vision of a bug in the figure of the artist, related to the artwork and the recipient. A complex set that has infinite solutions. 

 

 

Hany Armanious
"Pot Black", 2009
resin, silver
80 ø, 93 cm + 8 ø h, 131 h cm
work 9 shares
Photo E. Velo 
C.sy Raucci / Santamaria Gallery Naples                                                     
   
                                                        

                                                                         











Installation's view of Ugo Rondinone's show
"Turn back time. Let's start this day again "
 Galleria Raucci / Santamaria, Naples 2008 
Photo E. Velo 
C.sy Raucci / Santamaria Gallery Naples 

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David Maljkovic/ Susanne M. Winterling_Fondazione Morra Greco

D. Maljkovic, After Giuseppe Sambito, 2009                                     S.M.Winterling, Installation view show, Courtesy the artist Courtesy the artist

There is a psychological bond, which evokes the Freudian idea of uneasiness, in the way of understanding the physical space, a real structure such as a house or a room, as the place where emotions are materializing in their various shades.
In the sign of this idea the Fondazione Morra Greco opened the next season of exhibitions with a double solo-show of David Maljkovic (Rijeka, Croatia, 1973) and Susanne M. Winterling (Rehau, Germany, 1970), curated by Gigiotto Del Vecchio. Two are the essential key themes of the two exhibitons: the first concerns the relation between the person and the environment. The architecture becomes the mirror of a state of mind, full of charm and emotion. The second theme is the relation between the person and the history. Both shows through these issues by constructing a bipartite route, but consistent within the headquarters of the Fondazione Morra Greco, Palazzo Caracciolo d'Avellino. The itinerary of the show begins on the ground floor, in the basement, where Susanne Winterling presented some artworks, producted by the Fondazione, that has implemented a project inspired by the figure of Torquato Tasso, born in Sorrento, but also lived in Naples. Tasso was one of the owner of the Palazzo Caracciolo d’Avellino, but the other owner, Principe Caracciolo, didn’t recognize his property. This has been the reason of a long legal fight between Tasso and the Principe Caracciolo, that caused a lot of suffer to the writer, who was insane.

For the other part, at the first floor, David Maljkovic has presented a series of works inspired by the Italian pavilion of the fair in Zagreb, designed by Giuseppe Neapolitan Sambo. Both works represent a link with the Foundation that hosts them. Through this exhibition the artists introduce an issue that concerns the role of the artist in relation to history as the memory of a past event. The exhibition raises questions: can the past be deleted? Is it really possible to erase the memory of an event and a person? How healthy mind?
Susanne Winterling’s installations take place in the ground floor and in the former cellars of the palace. The intervention of the artist welcomes the viewer to entry - only note of disappointment for the bad condition of the palace - with The stairs upon the servants, a red carpet entrance. An artwork between the road and the exhibition space that marks a difference between the private dimension and the public context. With this red carpet the artist let the city broke into the Fondazione so that the exhibition space becomes a place where emotions live.

Inside the German artist presents a series of works dedicated to Torquato Tasso, author of the Gerusalemme Liberata, who died insane at the end of the sixteenth century. Tasso was the son of Portia de 'Rossi, but did not share much time with her mother because she died in obscure circumstances when he was still a child.

The Palazzo Caracciolo d'Avellino was half owned by the family and then was inherited de'Rossi to rate. But Prince Caracciolo, who took possation of an half of the property, would not relinquish possession of the villa which was long the subject of a dispute between the two. A question long and painful for Yew, recently left a shelter for the serious state of mental insane- rate was subject to states of confusion and delirium, had visions and delusions of persecution. The issue was resolved in his favor, but the Prince Caracciolo even then would not recognize the legitimate property to Torquato Tasso, who died alone and insane in Rome.
Winterling, who explores the lives interrupted by great exponents of culture, returns the memory of this event to the collective memory. A sort of final redemption of the Italian poet who suffered in life and escape marginalization, fear and madness. On the ground floor are exposed that Reflects The building itself, an installation that covers the floor and walls of the palace with a mirrored surface and A Gift for the aborted, two triangular structures which are now built from plexiglass Natural Reflection and Visual poem, photo prints color.

The exhibition space becomes the instrument through which emotions arise in connection with diseases of the space. The building is seen as the mirror of the rate of mental disorder. Like the neurotic, or to the panic the impression of space "possessed" or distortions of domestic space. Like a charm. The space itself begins to tell a story and becomes the meeting point between the size of the deep and surface. The trauma that causes the artist awakens the consciousness of the viewer. The plan of the cellars are exposed Storm, a sound installation loop, and two video installations in 16 millimeters Untitled (The Artist as Torquato Tasso) and The sparks. In the first film, played in the foreground, the artist painted and masked, while the head moves in jerks, mimicking a state of turmoil and upheaval characteristic of mads, while the second film reproduces the intermittent explosions of fireworks.
The artist intervenes in a place of historical, sociological and ethnographic, but also constitute an area U-topic. A transit zone between one place and no place, where the memory affects the present and in which we deal with conflicts.
David Maljkovic’show consist in establishing a dialogue with the history using a standardized language, but apparently sinking into a state of hallucination getting lost in memory. Maljkovic reflects on the past time of the former Yugoslavia, using architectural elements of the matrix utopian '60s and '70s and were the symbol of the communist regime and the government of Tito. In  the video installations These days, made in 2005 and Last Memories fromThese Days, 2006, shown in two halls at the end of the first floor corridor of the building, the Croatian artist constructs a narrative expanded to lose awareness of reality.

The videos were made in the construction of Joseph Sambito, the Italian pavilion of the Zagreb Fair, currently in a state of semi-abandonment, built by Josip Broz Tito as an extraordinary example of economic exchange between East and West.

The artist combines sculpture and video to create a dynamic structure that produces the state of collective memories. Characters of the films of the video-projections are young girls and boys, exacerbated by a frenzied expansion of the time, while thay are inside the hall of Sambito building. In these video-installations characters seem in a state of trance and move slowly, weakened by the passage of time, resulting in exhausting conversations. Each object symbol of power and economic exchange is reduced to a structure weak and empty.
Along the gallery rooms there is After Giuseppe Sambito, an installation created specifically for the exhibition, Maljkovic has created the sculptures, large wooden windows which contain a photograph of the sketch of the building, digitally manipulated and the branch of a palm tree. The installation is the echo of an icon the Italian Pavilion in Zagreb, a monument to economic success in the course of its history has suffered the defeat of oblivion.



David Maljkovic / Susanne M. Winterling
Fondazione Morra Greco
Largo Avellino, 17 Naples, Italy
Info: tel: +39 081 551 03 43
cellphone: +39 333 639 5093
email: info@fondazionemorragreco.com
website: www.fondazionemorragreco.com


From October 30^th, 2009 to 20^th February, 2010

Photos: Danilo Donzelli

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Martin Soto Climent 'Laberintome'_T293 Gallery

In all the arts there is a physical part that can no longer be regarded and treated as before, and that can not be subtracted to the interventions of modern knowledge and power. Neither the matter nor space nor time are no longer, for twenty years here, what had always been. It is expected that news of a similar scale to transform the entire artistic technique, and thus act on the same invention, to perhaps change the very notion of art beautifully.

Paul Valéry, Pièces sur l'art, Paris, (La Conquête de l'ubiquity)

  
A personal history or a common one can be told in many ways. Can be imagined as a linear path, aiming straight at a target. Or is it a spiral that rotates around itself. Unabated. Always the same and always different. But when a track is deleted, hidden, concealed then becomes like a maze that is difficult to disentangle. ‘Laberintome’ is the second Martin Soto Climent solo-show at T293 gallery .

The Mexican artist presents a series of artworks realized during a residence in Naples. The exhibition takes place as a labyrinth, shape of the history of his Country. Starting point of his reflection is an obscure event: the massacre of students during a demonstration at the Olympics in '68 in the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico City.

The gallery space is transformed into the mirror that reflects the artist's memories, emotions and unites distant places and different times. The exhibition starts on the ground floor in a new space, opened by T293 on this occasion, which directly faces away from the streets, next to the entrance of the tunnel. Inside this space is shown Marmoles oniricos an installation made of marble blocks tied together with tights for woman. The artist elaborates a dialectic tension that is based on opposing elements. The series of work takes the viewer into a rarefied dimension where objects are furthered in their meaning. On the first floor, the texture of the labyrinth proceeds through the combination of elements contrasting to each other, but complementary.

Blind feathers (always fall), a Venetian blind that is wrapped in a coil placed on the floor and Silent Rider, an ironing board and a pair of stockings hanging from the ceiling by a thread. The lightness and gravity are opposed elements related in this pair. The host installation, created by a mirrored surface upon which sit a duvet and other materials is rather analogous to Tres Dardos extraviados, a work on which three feathers are stuck on the sole of a slipper. The present and the past are in a relationship of constant tension. Following in the shadows of my wispers, a sculpture created by a pair of boots that leap out of her stockings and Estancias de polvo an installation created by an undergarment that includes a plate suspended in the middle of the room through a wire. In the final room is exposed Blind window, an homage to Marcel Duchamp's Etant donnés: a darkened room from a Venetian plastic which you can see a structure of the skeleton of a chair, some chess, a photograph and other objects not directly perceptible to the eye of the beholder. Martin Soto Climent performs a kind of self-analysis of the creative act and through this process discovers the ultimate possibilities of art making.

Martin Soto Climent  ‘Laberintome’
T293 Gallery
via dei Tribunali, 293 - Naples, Italy
info: +39 081 295 882
email: info@t293.it
website: www.t293.it

from 7 October to 14 November 2009

Images: Installation views
Photos: Danilo Donzelli
Courtesy: T293 Gallery 

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When I've begun to write about art I had a diary. Still I have it. I write everything it was important to me or just funny. I blind pictures, images and also postcard of the invitation at the opening. I write about the book I read and I record the link of articles captured from the web. Unpretentious I tell stories.

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