Luca Vitone

“Ich, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz” (I, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz) could easily be the name of a biopic, performance, or book. Instead, it is the apt title of Italian artist Luca Vitone’s recent site-specific exhibition, located down the street from the eponymous plaza. The works on display—thirteen nearly monochromatic off-white canvases of different sizes—present various irregularities and dirt marks. Vitone is an artist of “places” who for years has created works that explore the sites of his shows. In his latest exhibition, he has invited the local elements—dust, ashes, sunlight, rain—to upend his artistic authorship by leaving traces on the surface of plain white canvases that he left exposed on the rooftops of nearby houses for three months before the opening of the exhibition. The result is an unusual and puzzling “portrait” exhibition, which exudes typicial Italian leggerezza and scintillates with a diffident charm, all while bearing an old-school etiquette.

Rather than seeming spectacular, Vitone’s practice achieves far more useful ends: It reactivates discussions of site specificity and prompts contemplation of the role of contemporary art as a conceptual motor that drives viewers to question how actions inscribe themselves in places. By employing the medium of painting to capture and present a self-portrait of a place—currently, the culturally and historically laden Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz; last year, the United Arab Emirates, for his Sharjah Biennial contribution—Vitone pays tribute to urban situations and atmospheres and, more generally, to our cities as sites of contemporary existence and identity production. His canvases also reflect the ongoing debate over the role of the monochrome in contemporary art; they blend ease with heaviness, individuality with a whiff of banality, as well as pointing to the inevitable reality of larger forces.