“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

Mauro Vignando

GALLERIA ALESSANDRO DE MARCH
Via Ventura 6
September 15–November 5

Mauro Vignando, Untitled, 2011, wood, aluminium, enamels, 105” x 110” x 5”.

The word enigma has its origins in the ancient Greek verb ainissesthai, which means “to speak obscurely” or even “to speak in riddles.” Used literally, ainissesthai described incomprehensible discourse, while figuratively it referred to any sort of mystery. Given that the text accompanying Mauro Vignando’s solo show is titled “Enigma,” one wonders what the mystery in question might be. It seems, perhaps, to have something to do with the phenomenological issues raised by the works on view. In Base irregolare di una piramide (Irregular Base of a Pyramid), 2011, Vignando plays with perspective: While stretched out on a sofa in his home, he photographed the outdoor view of buildings and rooftops as seen through a window, its vertical edges converging due to his camera’s relatively low position. In the resulting print, he cut out the trapezoidal form of the window and pasted it on dibond backing, as if to emphasize its particular distorted shape as seen from the perspective of the photographer.

Nearby, Untitled, 2011, is a wooden magazine rack, painted over with brass-colored enamel, built from reproductions of fixtures and building materials that the artist discovered in a shopwindow in central Milan. Nearby, the video A0-Series (128 Variations), 2011, presents a brainteaser and describes the possible combinations of geometric figures—some 128 in all—that constitute the set of attempts at a solution. The series “Informe” (Formless), 2011, consists of geometric solids obtained by chiseling fragments of marble. The entire show is intentionally installed such that the works can be perceived from a wide range of viewpoints, and viewers ultimately discover that their experience of the show changes dramatically according to their location and even their posture.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Marco Tagliafierro

Reto Pulfer

ISTITUTO SVIZZERO DI ROMA | MILAN
Via Vecchio Politecnico 3
September 18–November 5

View of “Die Vertretung des Erschöpften” (Depicting Exhaustion), 2011.

Reto Pulfer’s work is best defined as painting, though it isn’t painting exactly. The thirty-year-old Swiss artist’s arrangements of dyed fabrics are not quite installations, either; they are more like paintings that extend in three dimensions, intolerant of the closed form of the conventional canvas but tied to the compositional principles of the medium. Indeed, Pulfer often thinks about his works in terms of figure and ground, and even its canonical materials (painted and drawn canvas) are borrowed from painting. His work is a form of abstraction with a subtly imaginative disposition, quiet yet rich in the latent energy that is also present in the artist’s brief, tumultuous musical performances. The work’s generative principle resides in a series of synesthetic associations, which he calls “mnemonics.”

In his current exhibition at the Swiss Institute—an indoor and completely reworked version of an outdoor installation shown at the Institute’s Roman branch last summer—these associations revolve around the idea of exhaustion, as evoked in the title of the work, Die Vertretung des Erschöpften (Depicting Exhaustion), 2011. At the center of the room, which is bedecked in turquoise fabrics and pieces of sewn-together leather, sits a small tent made of white veils. If one stands inside it and looks out, everything takes on a cloudy appearance, as if the beholder’s glance had been misted; on the floor are tools and small items made of hide, traces of a project apparently left unfinished. The performance during the show’s opening—a series of wild cries of jubilation—left the artist breathless. It is impossible, and also futile, to try to explain it all. Pulfer’s associations aspire not to coherence but to a different, more ambitious goal: poetry.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Simone Menegoi

Stefano Arienti

STUDIO GUENZANI
Via Eustachi 10
September 15–November 12

View of “Postcards,” 2011.

Stefano Arienti’s latest show consists of two works, both comprising polystyrene panels on which the artist has reproduced photographs of travel images. The exhibition’s title piece, Postcards, 1990–91, features eleven panels with images of tourist sites taken from postcards. Untitled, 1992, is composed of seventeen panels with images of photographs Arienti took during his travels. In both cases, the viewer encounters banal, typically touristic images that evoke both personal and collective histories and speak to the way private experiences can become the stock imagery of the public sphere—and vice versa.

Arienti emphasizes these dynamics through his use of space. The tall panels are propped against the walls, creating a pathway through the gallery. Neon tubes behind each allow light to pass through the perforated polystyrene, emphasizing the work’s expressive potential as well as its fragility. Walking through the exhibition, one has the sense of traversing both public and private domains; and, as light radiates out of the panels, pooling in the middle of the space, Arienti emphasizes of how deeply photography has entangled these two spheres.

Postcards was originally part of an installation exhibited at the 1990 Venice Biennale; looking at the work today, there is no mistake that it was a portent. Both pieces allude to the formal and conceptual lightness that would reach their peak the ’90s (as seen in the work of Maurizio Cattelan, Paola Pivi, and Vanessa Beecroft), and they anticipate the recent interest in cultural memory and the archive as an artistic paradigm. In an age when photography is more ubiquitous than ever, the prescience of Arienti’s two works continues to prevail.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Vincenzo de Bellis

Ketty La Rocca

GALLERIA MILANO
via Manin 13 - via Turati 14
September 16–November 19

Ketty La Rocca, Urs Luthi (Inga Pin study), 1974, black-and-white photograph, pencil and ink on paper, 28 x 12”.

This small but intense retrospective of work by Ketty La Rocca continues Galleria Milano’s rigorous research into the history of relatively underrecognized artists, scholars, and musicians from the 1960s and ’70s. La Rocca was an Italian Conceptual artist and poet whose output primarily investigated the body and language. She created extremely powerful works, such as the pictorial sequences in the so-called polyptychs of her “Riduzioni” (Reductions) series, 1973–75. These began with images from old snapshots, postcards, and advertisements, which she found in archives and flea markets. La Rocca deconstructed these images first by photocopying or photographing them and then by placing a piece of transparent paper over the reproduction and making an outline of the objects or figures, using words instead of lines to trace the shapes. More often than not the sentences are illegible.

Here, more than in any of her other works, there is an obvious critique of the redundancy of images and a clear manifestation of the artist’s existential point of view. The handwriting that annuls and empties out the images makes them banal and at the same time fills them with a search for meaning. The nonsensical text expresses the impenetrability of a personal “you,” repeated like a mantra, confirming an empathically direct exchange between author and reader. In addition to the Riduzioni, the show brings together a selection of works made between 1963 and 1975, including an X-ray of her skull in Craniologia (Craniology) from 1975, collages of visual poetry, artist’s books, and the video Tempo (Time), 1974, the only work in which the artist shows her own face.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Alessandra Pioselli

Luigi Presicce

MARSÈLLERIA
Via Paullo 12/a
October 27–November 25

Luigi Presicce, untitled, 2011, still from a color video, 6 minutes.

Oneiric, reminiscent of Renaissance paintings, and seemingly embedded with references to the darkest chapters of Italy’s history (such as the killing of Mussolini in Mezzegra, Italy), Luigi Presicce’s new photos and videos in his solo show “In forma di autoscopia” (In the form of autoscopy) are haunting. An ad hoc work created for the occasion, Il grande architetto (The Great Architect), 2011, is presented as a video installation. Inspired by the killing of Hiram Abiff––a key allegorical figure in Masonic ritual and the architect of the temple of Solomon––the four untitled and looped video projections appear at first as freeze-frame images of a single story. In fact they are shots that often frame immobile figures caught in the act of doing something or holding a pose––stock-still, as if frozen by the shutter release.

In the first video, a man on horseback whose face is covered by a pyramid-shaped helmet holds in his hand a mask with the features of the writer and philosopher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. At his side is another man who holds the reins, his torso bare and face covered. The figures stand in front of Lu Cafausu, an eighteenth-century coffeehouse. In the background one can glimpse an anonymous modern building that clashes with the elegance of the figures and with the architecture of the older structure. In the second video, three men with exposed torsos mime the act of striking and destroying the golden head. The scene unfolds on a heap of earth in a bauxite quarry in Otranto, Italy. The men symbolize three followers of Abiff who killed their master with tools of geometry, which are evocative because they are taken directly from a Renaissance-style painting exhibited in the show. The third video transmits an overturned image of a crane; once the framing is turned right side up, the viewer understands that the crane serves to support the body of a man, namely one of the three followers, who are all executed: one crucified, one stoned to death, and one hung from a rope. The fourth video, set in a quarry in Lecce, Italy, represents expiation. Two men are filmed while inside an old tufa quarry from the early twentieth century; one holds a book and a three-dimensional model of the rules for constructing cathedrals. Thus concludes the allegorical tale that Presicce reveals with conscious visual and evocative skill.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Filippo Romeo

Igor Eškinja

FEDERICO LUGER GALLERY
via Circo, 1
November 15–January 1

View of “The Day After,” 2011.

The works in Igor Eškinja’s current solo show, “The Day After,” evoke an impressive postindustrial building in Milan that long ago housed the Officine Meccaniche Riva Calzoni factory, and was more recently the home of the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro. This past October, the Croatian artist was scheduled to have an exhibition in the project room of the latter institution––an installation and a series of large-scale photographs depicting ephemeral, site-specific pieces in the space. Viewers were not intended to have direct access to the installation; on the light-gray floor of the Fondazione, Eškinja had created wavelike drawings from the black detritus produced by the casting of metals in the factory. These drawings represented a pitch-colored sea; they were meant to recall the water used in the factories of old Milan. Yet the exhibition never occurred, as the Fondazione shut down in September. What remained, in addition to the photographs, were two videos Eškinja made as documentation of his drawings. Those permanent works, which were meant to celebrate the history of the site, would have become part of the history of the building itself.

Here, Eškinja revives the work he had created for the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro. Two projectors transmit videos of the artist sweeping the dust in the old project room, immortalizing his activity. The result is a meditation on monumentality and a dramatic restructuring of the energies that it can entail. A few images of the mysterious installation of black debris round out the show.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Marco Tagliafierro

Jordan Wolfson

T293 | ROME
Via dei Leutari 32
September 22–November 10

View of “Jordan Wolfson, 2011.”

Many would agree that it is much easier (and less time-consuming) to look at the pictures that illustrate a text in book or magazine than to read the actual text itself. This is one of the many contested ideas in Jordan Wolfson’s current exhibition in Rome, where iconographic appearance is so complex and stratified that reading a text would actually be much less work.

Two flat-screen monitors face off in the gallery’s central space, while thirteen digital prints are distributed over the walls. Each of the prints is the result of a superimposition of different types of images, and viewers may be able to recognize some of the source material. Included here are George Grosz’s 1919 drawing Ledebour, from the artist’s “Ecce Homo” series; the logo of a Santa Cruz skateboard manufacturer that depicts a hand, dismembered from its body, with a shrieking mouth on the palm; reproductions of the painting Pages from a Painted Album, ca. 1930, by Uemura Shōen, in which a woman is raped by two men; American corporate logos; and a still from an animated cartoon depicting Shylock (protagonist of the artist’s 2011 video Animation, masks).

The two monitors nearby show contrasting pictures of lobster claws, each featuring a sticker with a pornographic image of a young man gazing directly into the camera. Slowly, on first one video and then the other, a hand holding a razor blade cuts the elastic band that holds the claws closed. The prints and videos don’t immediately seem to belong together, but this apparently incongruous pairing points toward the conceptual core of the show: Wolfson has given us an overproduction of icons, generating a subtle play of references that leads us to reflect on the credibility, the value, the power and––why not?––the futility of images themselves.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Vincenzo de Bellis

“Voyage Around My Room”

NORMA MANGIONE GALLERY
Via Matteo Pescatore 17
November 5–December 22

View of “Voyage Around My Room,” 2011.

In 1790, French aristocrat Xavier de Maistre was caught dueling and placed under house arrest. During the forty-two days he spent in his cramped quarters in Turin, de Maistre produced what would later become Voyage Around My Room, 1794, a witty travelogue detailing his adventures within his own apartment. The aristocrat’s flights of domestic fantasy merely flirt with the kind of interior obsession at play within the neighboring Casa Mollino, an extravagant garçonnière entirely outfitted by Carlo Mollino in the 1960s. The prolific designer created every last detail of the apartment, which provided a setting for his private Polaroid photo sessions with Turinese townswomen but also, perhaps even more provocatively, was intended to serve as the artist’s tomb.

If Casa Mollino was conceived as an entryway between two worlds, the works in “Voyage Around My Room”––a group exhibition curated by artist Becky Beasley as an ode to Mollino’s apartment––are suitably intermediary, crossing genres with a slyness that does not immediately reveal itself. Photographs by Anne Hardy and Annette Kelm appear closer to the surfaces they depict––a denuded event-listings wall and floral-patterned fabric. In deference to de Maistre (who never took the straight path from the bed to the armchair, preferring instead to “follow every line possible in geometry”), Beasley has built the exhibition on irregular angles. Her own sepulchral black-lacquered cedar plinth, Perinde Ac Cadaver, 2011, is cut with deceptively tapering corners. On the next pedestal, Robert Ellis’s water-colored carton sculpture 15323, 2011, departs from an architectural model toward something of a Rubik’s cube gone awry.

All of the imperfect angles seem to lead back into the second room, where a dark patch of pubic hair punctuates the cocked hips at the center of a Mollino Polaroid. The purported genesis of the exhibition, the photograph is framed against Thomas Demand’s red curtain wallpaper. Beside this ad hoc altar, Kim Schoen’s clever A Work Made from Bed, 2010 (filmed within Proust’s reconstructed boudoir in Paris’s Carnavalet Museum), reminds us that while we can never truly get into the imagination of the artist, at least we can get into his room.

— Kate Sutton

Simon Starling

FONDAZIONE MERZ
Via Limone, 24
October 29–January 15

Left: Mario Merz, Movements of the Earth and the Moon on an Axis, 2003, triple igloo: metal tubes, glass, stone, neon, clamps, clay, 19’ 7” x 16’ 4” x 9’ 8”. Right: Simon Starling, 1,1,2, 2011, carrara marble blocks, slings, pulley systems, rope, cable, shackles, dimensions variable.

Exhibitions curated by artists who use appropriation pose interesting problems. The most compelling regards status: What is the boundary between a show curated by an artist consisting of works by others, and a show in which an artist appropriates others’ work as part of his practice? Although appropriation is not at the core of Simon Starling’s work, he often incorporates design objects and sometimes works of art in their own right into his pieces. Responding to the invitation to create a project at the Fondazione Merz, Starling has selected, in addition to his own works, a heterogeneous constellation of objects, among which are Sture Johannesson’s experiments with computer graphics from the early 1970s, Faivovich & Goldberg’s documents about an area of Argentina struck by a meteor shower, and the wonderful series “Illustration for the Moon; Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite” created in 1874 by amateur astronomers Nasmyth and Carpenter, which features photographs of small-scale models of the lunar surface where Galileo meets Méliès. The selection overall orbits around the theme of astronomy, drawing parallels between creativity in science and creativity in art while touching on Starling’s favorite themes: the interweaving of historical and cultural events that surround objects, as well as translation in the broad sense of the word—here, the displacement of artifacts or words from one system of cultural parameters to another.

The result, to return to our initial question regarding the distinction between artist and curator, is unclassifiable. Starling’s exhibition can be considered a show “curated by” the artist (because it is a relatively traditional display of artworks) or, and with equal legitimacy, an exhibition “of” the artist (because of its ties with Starling’s own work and its conceptual background). One might even think of “The Inaccessible Poem” as an artwork itself. Whatever is it, it’s remarkable: The associations and comparisons presented within this body of work—which are as intellectually sophisticated as Starling at his best—marries, to paraphrase Nabokov, the precision of poetry to the imagination of science.

— Simone Menegoi

“TRA”

FORTUNY MUSEUM
San Marco 3780
June 4–November 24

Marina Abramović, Stromboli, 2002, still from a black-and-white video, 19 minutes 22 seconds.

Stepping into Axel Vervoordt’s latest curatorial collaboration is akin to entering a monastery, albeit a highly aesthetic and well-furnished one. As “TRA” unfolds over the four floors of this Gothic palazzo—the former home and studio of turn-of-the-century designer Mariano Fortuny—it seems to play against current curatorial sensibilities that often put across didactic ideas at the expense of poetic notions. Here, one finds a feeling of openness and ambiguity; the exhibition allows each viewer to meander along the trends of his or her own experiences. The curators note that “-tra” is both a Sanskrit suffix (e.g., mantra, yantra) and “art” spelled backwards, as well as an Italian preposition signifying “in-between-ness.” For them, therefore, it stands for the notion of liminality, a gateway, just as Venice for them symbolizes a place between East and West.

Mirroring the Biennale, “TRA” puts forth a glut of work; instead of merely featuring contemporary art, however, it includes a motley agglomeration of items, ranging from early Cuneiform tablets to Fortuny’s studio, typically closed to visitors. Objects, antiquities, and artworks mix freely in this exhibition; a Rothko, for example, hangs—not out of place—above a tapestry. “TRA” leans toward the handmade and expressive, but not at the expense of the conceptual. A long cabinet is transformed into a miniuniverse of internalized and intuitive gestures: A 1960s Opalka drawing sits by a nineteenth-century tantric mandala, while nearby lies a Duchamp Rotorelief, 1935.

In the end, the project has a contemplative nature perhaps best summed up by one of the videos on view: Marina Abramović’s 2002 Strombli, in which she lies in the ocean, her head moving gently and rhythmically with the lapping of the waves. It is not a succinct show, but then again, would a garden of earthly delights be so?

— Sherman Sam