Building Utopia and Abstraction
 
opening June 20, 6.30 p.m.
June 20 – September 19, 2013
 
Federico Bianchi Contemporary Art is glad to present the collective exhibition Building Utopia and Abstraction, opening on June 20, 2013 (6.30 p.m.) in via Imbonati 12, Milan, featuring works by Giuseppe Armenia, Paola Di Bello, Radomir Damnjan, Zuzanna Janin, Tony Just, Jacopo Mazzonelli, Domenico Piccolo, Bert Theis, Magda Tothova, Alexander Wolff, Pierre Poggi, Jacopo Prina, Anna Orlikowska, almost all shown for the first time.
 
To construct a utopia is always an act of negation toward an existing reality, a desire to transform it.Leszek Kolakowski, 1968 – The dimension of abstract art finds a psychological sense in the search for a visionary world, new and moulded after shapes to match ideals, beyond the mere formal/real dimension of things.
 
Building abstraction, or better to generally abstract, leads to a utopic (wished for) vision of the spaces (in Bert Theis’ active installations or in Pierre Poggi’s football fields transformations), or to a radicalization of the forms of reality (in Alexander Wolff, Radomir Damnjan e Jacopo Prina’s works).
 
It starts from the perspective of reality deformed in the works “natural-mente” by Paola Di Bello and Domenico Piccolo’s paintings to get to an object or a concept that is abstracted itself in Giuseppe Armenia and Zuzanna Janin’s works.
 
The cancellation in Tony Just’s painting goes back to the basic concept of abstraction, as a not immediately recognizable reality, because as Hilton Kramer well underlines in “Abstaction and Utopia”, abstract artists don’t question the existence of the material world, their goal was change it - to eliminate its imperfections in order to establish an ideal harmony, at once social an spiritual, in every sphere of earthly human endeavour. This is quite visible in the works of Magda Tothova and Anna Orlikowska.
 
To keep quoting Kramer: “whereas theosophical belief is essentially religious in nature, utopian thought is fundamentally political, for it seks to realize its model of human perfection by bringing about a radical transformation of society and its institutions. while both envision an ideal future, it is in the nature of utopian thought to imagine that the particular “heaven” it hypothesizes can be created on earth.”
 
Abstraction has therefore in this exhibition a definite ideal value that rises, amplifies and transcends the sphere of art.