Andrea Kvas

For his first solo museum exhibition in Italy, Andrea Kvas has installed his untitled Minimalist artworks (all works 2012–13) in the underground chapel of the Museo Marino Marini, named after the twentieth-century Pistoian artist whose colorful sculptures often resemble three-dimensional paintings. Kvas’s latest work locates painting not on the frontal surface of a canvas but rather inside of rooms, the space reserved for objects.

One included work consists of twenty wooden planks, each measuring over six feet in length, neatly stacked on top of one another and wedged weblike in between the walls of a narrow crevice. Each plank is painted in a unique color scheme with polychrome brushstrokes that act as an optical mortar, the paint employing the same effect of antigravity as the tension rods as they jimmy up the nave’s architecture. Due to their slatted proximity, together the planks create a visual incongruence akin to a randomly reconstituted pile of shredded color printouts.

For this occasion, Kvas also incorporated polyurethane foam of pure color into shapes reminiscent of giant, dusty pastel chalks. Each are chipped as if tumbled together out of their box, regathered in one of the rooms over a mantel as beavers would timber for a dam. Other groupings are shuffled to a corner or laid on the floor (where Kvas usually paints), waiting to be picketed into a fence. In the interplay between intention and execution, the exhibition isn’t fixed; the artist even rearranges some of these works during the exhibition’s run. Here, sculpture isn’t a painting, nor is painting a sculpture. It is the paint itself, which barely hangs onto its support, that creates a different kind of engagement.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.