“Make Up”

A PALAZZO GALLERY
PIAZZA TEBALDO BRUSATO 35
December 15–March 11

View of “Make Up,” 2012.

Allegory may well be the underlying theme of “Make Up,” the group show at A Palazzo Gallery. If the exhibition’s title can mean “to apply cosmetics” or “to reconcile,” it can also mean “to invent”—and indeed, over the course of the eighteenth century, allegory became an occasion for inventing innumerable linguistic artifices. It is no accident that Mariuccia Casadio, curator of this show, has set the exhibition within the splendid frame of the eighteenth-century palace housing the gallery; her decision demonstrates a critical awareness and philological spirit that is unusual in our time.

In many of the exhibition’s rooms, Casadio’s curatorial project yields authoritative results, characterized by a triumphant display of whimsical work by thirteen artists. Standouts include wonderful sculptures Dr. Lakra created for the occasion; for one piece, the artist used blue ballpoint pen to draw tattoos all over a statuette of a 1950s pinup girl. A series of works by Maurizio Anzeri—vintage photographic portraits on which the artist has embroidered abstract motifs in colored and sometimes metallic threads—are scattered throughout the exhibition as if their goal were to guide the viewer through the various surprises that await. Meanwhile, Benny Chirco has used two Baroque-style end tables as supports for a series of portraits that document the progressive evolution of a famous portrait by Giovanni Boldini titled Mademoiselle de Nemidoff, 1908, reproduced by Chirco several times such that each successive painting shows the subject transforming into a young, seductive man, through what one might call a morphing done in analog. But one installation is particularly breathtaking: In a room otherwise adorned with stuccoed details, mirrors, and frescoes, the largest of several undecorated walls is the site of a video projection by John Bock, Fischgratenmelkstand kippt ins Hohlengleichnis Refugium (Fish-bone-milking-stand Collapses into the Allegory of the Cave Refuge), 2008. Bock’s piece immortalizes two protagonists—one female, the other male—in rococo dress, interacting in a public bath. Shot in a brilliant, changing green hue, the projection reverberates throughout the baroque space and lights up the surrounding mirrors, which, as if by magic, come to resemble small monitors.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Marco Tagliafierro