Mat Collishaw will come back to FaMa Gallery with a solo exhibition called PRETERNATURAL. A protagonist of Young British Art Movement, today Collishaw is one of the most interesting artists on the English art scene.
 
The exhibition – which opens on Friday 7th June 2013 and runs through to 28th September – presents an important body of work made up of some the artist’s latest pieces and the unedited series Burning Butterflies.
 
Starting from the assumption that the production of an image is always an act of violence that negates the essence of the object in the very moment when it represents it and its transient and ephemeral nature is substituted by a fixed, eternal and innatural one, Collishaw tries to achieve – and to describe through his works – this process of disintegration that concerns whatever becomes “the image”.
 
PRETERNATURAL, the title of the project presented at FaMa Gallery, recalls the dimension of the supernatural and extraordinary, which transcends the limits of the real – and refers at the same time to Collishaw’s typical artistic practice, always engaged on an analysis that calls into question the reassuring certainties given by the conventional representation of the real and lingers instead over the fine line between beauty and decay, life and death.
 
The Crystal Gaze No. 5 is a three-dimensional image that slowly lights up, thus revealing a bird entrapped inside a frozen landscape. When the light wanes, the viewer is left only with the reflection of his or her own gaze. A journey from light to darkness, and vice versa, inspired by the myth of Orpheus – which Collishaw reads through the interpretation of some philosophers like Maurice Blanchot, Geoffrey Sirc and Jacques Lacan – becomes the symbol of that creative process capable of compensating for the loss – that of Eurydice in the Greek mythology, that of reality for Collishaw – with the artistic creation.
 
The unedited series Burning Butterflies – on display at FaMa Gallery with 25 photographs of different dimensions – goes back to the indissoluble link between beauty and destruction with pictures of delicately winged butterflies that are destroyed by a relentless fire. A fleeting beauty, destroyed in few seconds, is thus grabbed and fixed forever thanks to an image.
In the same way, the work Insecticide28 fixes the rests of a butterfly squashed on a surface in an image of unsettling beauty. In this case the picture becomes a sort of petite mort, the representation of a life that has just stopped existing.
 
Three works belonging to the series Venal Muse are also on display at FaMa. The series was thought as a tribute to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal: the depicted flowers, genetically altered and infected with scars and sores, seem to be consumed by an inexorable decay which damages their beauty. Collishaw lingers once again, through these images, on the appeal conveyed by beauty and its corruption.
 
The installation Preternaturalia ideally closes the display. Inside a tabernacle a flower blossoms and is destroyed by an eternal fire, which nourishes and consumes it at the same time.
 
A catalogue of the exhibition will be published with a critical contribution by Sue Hubbard.

“They are a mirror, an echo: the epitaph”. These were the words Borges used in order to speak about the infinite, the innumerable, about time, eternity, and the cyclic nature of time. But also to underline the cohabitation and coexistence of all things, of their fluid and uninterrupted connection that continues through the presence (or disappearance) of the author himself. And yet all of the recent art by Andrea Bianconi (Arzignano, 1974; he lives and works in Vicenza and New York) seems concentrated on the idea of perpetuating what exists, of the persistence of existence, even when this are nothing more than remnants, ingenious or malicious remains. The artist seems to push his actions to their extreme consequences by tying together or linking a whole range of objects in a kind of romantic and surreal flood, until they lose their usual sense and recognisability. What counts above all is his utopian idea of collecting together the whole world, as though it were a house full of lovable ghosts, a collection of circumstantial knowledge exposed to the fragility and change that characterize knowledge itself. Nothing can really be ordered and classified: the tools that Bianconi uses in order to assemble his bizarre archive (strings, knots, cages, glues), more than uniting and enclosing, reawaken the “demons of analogy” to spark off an infinite game of allusions, links, and visual possibilities. His installations of black-painted wooden and metal cages are nothing other than “sculptures” that draw space. It is all an entrance and exit of marks, a tangle of lines, as in Piranesi‘s endless “prisons”: architectural labyrinths of stairs, planes, and arches that climb towards the void. The artist himself speaks of “continuous superimpositions, of constructions and deconstructions”; he has said, “I use cages because my head is exploding with ideas and I can’t contain them all”.
And yet Bianconi seems to contain them in his latest series of works, “Love Story”, where he covers chairs, bicycles and, above all, vases of flowers, with cement, Vinavil, and various enamels. And as we know, to apply colour to something means to make it intimate, to invade its fullness, and to share its essence. In fact, what appears to be near is also marked as being placed at a distance: we recognize it but we can never fully understand it because it is placed beyond the world of phenomena. As Luigi Meneghelli has written in the catalogue, “it is part of metaphysics: it hosts emptiness, is the custodian of silence, and accepts the void”. In other words, once again Bianconi's vision does not dwell on the opacity of things and objects, but multiplies their possibilities for surprising, and illuminates reality through unforeseen views and strange combinations. They echo with the resonance of Borges.