“House Painter” has a pitched roof, a door, three windows and even a little front porch. It is literally a house made out of paintings. About a hundred paintings cover the exterior, combined together as if they were simple construction materials, creating the effect of a visual kaleidoscope.
None of the paintings were made specifically for the House: “plein-air”, portraits, self-portraits, nudes, still-lifes, abstract and text paintings become a sort of narrative of the artist‘s experimenting with pictorial language in the last few years, and each of them was made independently of the other. Only later did Cross assemble them to become part of a more pervasive and comprehensive experience.
 
The epiphany of lights, colours, shapes and unexpected relations between them and the piece, as generated by the work on the easel inside this “new studio” became a revelation for the artist.
 
His construction and painting approach breaks down the language barriers we often use to separate disciplines and styles: architecture, sculpture and painting blur together and strike a dialogue within a dimension of total power of expression.
 
“Recycle the painting: flip it over and start anew; cut it up and collage the parts onto another painting. Screw a few paintings together to create a larger surface and then paint on top of it all over again. Or, combine paintings together and make a house.” That is his practice, openly declared and applied in this project acting more like a bridge, connecting “opposite” sides - inside and outside, personal and public - in line with his vision of life experienced as a an on-going “artist’s residence”.
 
The exhibition can be visited free of charge, during the opening hours of the Collezione Maramotti.
Thursday and Friday 2.30pm – 6.30pm
Saturday and Sunday 10.30am – 6.30pm

Laure Prouvost, the recipient of the fourth Max Mara Art Prize for Women, presents “Farfromwords: car mirrors eat raspberries when swimming through the sun, to swallow sweet smells” at the Maramotti Collection. Previously exhibited in London at the Whitechapel Gallery (20 March – 7 April 2013), the work has been purchased for our permanent collection.
 
Laure Prouvost’s new work is an environment that the viewer is cordially invited to enter: a large circular room in which a variety of media (photographs, collage, video clips, graffiti) enter into dialog with one another.
The perimeter of the canvas, which constitutes the environment’s walls, is everywhere covered with visionary images of a Surrealist tone, and its principle of formal organization is polycentric: a panoply of objects, faces, bodies, and landscapes, all punctuated by eigth video screens running passages drawn from the film “Swallow”. The entirety of the iconography that populates the room finds its inspiration in the aesthetic co-ordinates and sensual pleasures to be met while visiting Italy, on terms of a highly personal interpretation of the notion of an Italian Grand Tour in which objects and persons are the vehicles of encounters and experiences which the artist lived in the course of her residency in Italy.
At the rear of the room, the visitor enters a darkened space that hosts the projection of the entirety of the new film “Swallow”. The film’s montage is scansioned by the rhythm of the breathing of a large mouth, the image and sounds of which are fragmentarily interspersed among vivid, sensual, idylliacal visions which are charged with luminous vibrations: blue skies with scudding white clouds, gusts of wind and flights of birds, ice-cream cones, mature fruits, budding flowers, embraces and caresses, fresh grass, springs and fountains.
The rhythm of breathing that permeates the film moves in unison with the breathing of the visitor, and visitors are encouraged to project their own sensorial perceptions onto what they’re observing and hearing: this is the source of the sense of profound and playful pleasure that the artist’s work transmits with such great immediacy.
The artist herself appears in the film, along with other young women in joyous and sensual water games that precisely refer to events and encounters that the artist experienced in the course of her six-month residency in Rome and Biella.
 
This sojourn is amply and richly documented in the book that accompanies the exhibition, and which has the flavor of a diary, rich with visual and written notations. The book also presents an interview with the artist by Bina von Stauffenberg, as well as contributions from Daniel F. Herrmann (curator of the Whitechapel Gallery) and Melissa Gronlund (editor of “Afterall”), all three of whom will be present on 4 May for the occasion of the private view.
 
In the course of the private view, on 4 May, Melissa Gronlund and Laure Prouvost, will also engage in a conversation on the theme of the relationship between art/reperesentation and real life which the artist addresses in this work, as well as on the confrontation between “the banal” and “the dramatic” in her experince of life in Italy. The dialogue, entitled Competition with Real Life, will be enriched by a dramatization on the part of the performer and opera singer Cristina Zavalloni, who thus makes a further contribution to this vision or interpretation which finds all of its protagonists in women, and which focuses not simply on grand ideas, but also on other essential elements of life.
 
The biennial Max Mara Art Prize for Women supports and promotes the work of artists who reside in the United Kingdom by offering its recipients the opportunity to explore their potential by way of the production of new art works during a six-month residency in Italy. The jury for this fourth edition of the prize was chaired by Iwona Blazwick and further consisted of Lisa Milroy, artist; Muriel Salem, collector; Amanda Wilkinson, gallerist; and Gilda Williams, writer and art critic.
 
5 May – 3 November 2013
The exhibition can be visited free of charge during the opening hours of the permanent collection.
Thursday and Friday: 2.30pm – 6.30pm
Saturday and Sunday: 10.30am – 6.30pm
Closed from August 1 to August 25

“A permanently open window” is Jason Dodge’s first permanent installation.
The project was conceived for an abandoned industrial space, now transformed into a commercial outlet, adjacent to the Maramotti Collection, in Reggio Emilia.
 
Realized in what was once the tower of a factory’s electrical power plant, the work consists of three elements: a permanently opened window at the summit of the tower (as an appropriation of everything that appertains to the air), two cedarwood doors sequentially in line with one another (as a double threshhold for a possible passage of bodies made of air), and a sculpture entitled Alphabet.
The elements that constitute this tryptich supplant the high-voltage cables that once criss-crossed the tower, and they link with one another to construe a new and different order of space, no less than a new and different mode of perception.
 
The hidden lives of little things, of the often minimal utilitarian objects of which the work makes use, subtracted from their original functions, stand at the center of the practice of Jason Dodge: his works attempt to give new life to objects, and to generate new and personal experiences for the viewer, who thus becomes an active part of the artist’s work. Dodge here invites the viewer to encounter the work in a particularly performative way: in a process of approach and discovery in which the very place—which indeed is a “place” and not simply a “space”—that hosts the elements of the work that “inhabits” it tends to subvert the traditional modes of viewer perception and thus to involve the viewer in an experience of a new and different conception of significant form.
 
Traces of reflection on the meaning and import of this work are found in the poems “God of Rooms” by Jean Velentine, “The Fact of the Door Framed” by Adrienne Rich and “Alphabet” by Inger Christensen.
Poetry is a language with which the artist is highly familiar, and with which he maintains a constant dialogue.
So, it is not by chance that the day of of the work’s inauguration foresees a conversation between Jason Dodge and Matthew Dickman, an American poet with whom the artist is developing a collaborative project.
 
“A permanently open window”
a permanent installation by Jason Dodge
[Via Fratelli Cervi 61, Reggio Emilia, Italy]
 
Opening: 5 May 2013
h. 11.00am, Collezione Maramotti:
Matthew Dickman and Jason Dodge in conversation
 
The permanent installation can then be visited up to 6.00 pm.
Free admission on a first come, first served basis (booking is advisable):
email: info@collezionemaramotti.org
ph. +39 0522 382484
 
Visits to the installation start May 2013 on request to Collezione Maramotti.