Luca Buvoli
SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY
522 West 24 Street
February 14–March 21
View of “Luca Buvoli,” 2009.
Italian-born artist Luca Buvoli has consistently reinterpreted Futurism in innovative and effective ways, culling inspiration from the seminal avant-garde movement’s central themes. The artist’s current exhibition at this gallery commemorates the hundred-year anniversary of F. T. Marinetti’s “Fondation et Manifeste du Futurisme,” the text in which the theorist famously outlined the movement’s concepts of movement and destruction. Buvoli’s works literalize, in varied media, this urgent appeal for velocity. Instant Before Incident (all works 2008), for instance, depicts the automobile accident that allegedly inspired Marinetti’s text. This installation, which surrounds the viewer on entering the gallery, features large, fragmented forms evocative of acceleration and the force of impact. Through sheer volume, Instant Before Incident both affirms and interrogates the quintessential Futurist experience, simulating the psychological effect of such physical force. The vivid colors and formal symmetry seem to oppose an avant-garde anti-aesthetic.
The exhibition also includes Excerpts from: Velocity Zero, a video in which aphasics slowly read Marinetti’s manifesto, providing a sound track to bullet-point illustrations of the text. The combination of aesthetics and theory effectively demonstrates the complex dualism of vanguard practice. Such works may be somewhat obvious in their forthright dealing with Futurism; Buvoli’s exhibition, however, is illuminating in its presentation of a watershed movement that is often taken for granted.