Daniele Milvio, Brache, Installation view at Supportico Lopez, Berlin, 2017
has something of the illusion of a street magician. The artist's work has never been far from using
his previous exhibitions. What happens to Supportico Lopez is slightly different though.
Brache reminds of a series of idioms. The 'brache' in Italian are the trousers: the word is associated
with the saying of 'calare le brache', a 'brache calate', which recalls feeling naked, exposed, disarmed.
On the other side, in German, ‘brache’ means uncultivated, wild.
The exhibition demonstrates a critical and courageous moment in the artist's journey, which also
involves a private side of his life.
The exhibition insists on the idea as clear and confused and at the same time distinct and obscure,
according to the Leibnizian theory, taken by Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition.
The works are exhibited in semi-darkness. Along the wall, in front of the entrance, there are a
series of boards on which are affixed papers. These collages are made with documents of
various origins, letters of lawyers, insurance companies and public officers etc. Everything is
further written, marked, by the unintelligible handwriting of Daniele Milvio.
At the back of the room, the thing that perhaps I liked the most: two bronze street lamps made with
a globe attached on very long and decorated stems, attached on a base made by a bell. To see
them was how to recognize an object in a dream.
On the wall that opens archway towards the smaller room, are installed a series of drawings, colorful
infernal masks. They bear the names of various characters: un batticazziere,
l’incensurato, l’iscaiuolo, Er Più, È un ragazzo sensibbile, Faina etc.
In the smaller room, there is another globe and a last panel with some written paper and a drawing
of three carabinieri. The carabinieri, with the typical boat-shaped hat, could be the same
who captured Pinocchio, Collodi's puppet, who in the dream of becoming 'a real child', wild at
heart, subverts all the rules.
So are the series of drawings and graphics, not far from the influence of free association,
surrealist automatic writing and visual poetry, those papers were collected over the years since he
was a child of 10 years. They are inscribed on white sheets or already 'marked' from real
life experiences of the artist.
Daniele Milvio builds in the exhibition an inextricable link between life and art that can
be assimilated to a work of constant translation between images and real words and vision.
The word pun, which gives the title to the show, reminds me of the continuous relationship
between word and image. Just like in magic. The start is the press release of the exhibition written
in English and German: a letter from Daniele Milvio to Stefania Palumbo and Gigiotto
Del Vecchio, founders and curators of Supportico Lopez. In his letter Milvio writes that his
drawings / graphics are illegible and this has nothing to do with the fact that the exhibition
takes place in Germany.
Instead, in my opinion, this is precisely the point. His writing, incomprehensible, if not to his
close circle, his drawings of infernal masks, exorcise the feeling of being 'out of place'
of deterritorialization.
It would be useless to think of being able to decipher these signs. There is no will to reveal
and analyze. Daniele Milvio does not regress to the search for a mysterious identity and even less
to search for the lost object. It would be useless and right.
He looks at the root of a life, which led him to this point. Once again, Daniele Milvio plays with
the idea of the End, or rather of time as an endless circle.
The torrent of untranslatable words, so re-contextualized in the exhibition, does not want to close
the visitor in a defined horizon, put him /her on the corner in a game of mirrors and reflections,
but on the contrary, open many possibilities with signs, masks, incomprehensible words.
Daniele Milvio, Brache, Installation view at Supportico Lopez, Berlin, 2017
Daniele Milvio, Brache, Installation view at Supportico Lopez, Berlin, 2017
Daniele Milvio, Brache, Installation view at Supportico Lopez, Berlin, 2017
