Meris Angioletti

The title of Meris Angioletti’s exhibition, “Ginnastica Oculare” (Ocular Gymnastics), suggests an exercise that will prove to be visual rather than cerebral, although inevitably connected to the latter. A silent video that depicts mimes creating numbers and other objects with their bodies projects the viewer onto an imagined theatrical stage. In the adjacent audio work, 28 marzo 2009, Hotel Hilton, Milano, 2009, a man’s voice repeats a complex sequence of digits. The speaker seems to have an exceptional memory and appears to be the inventor of a method for remembering numbers or texts by associating them with images. Intriguingly, Angioletti links the video and the sound recording: The mimes represent the man’s visual memory. Viewers thus find themselves in the midst of an exhibition that is both palpable and elusive. The third work in the show, S. Kracauer. Il romanzo poliziesco. Un trattato filosofico, trad. it. di R. Cristin, Roma, Editori Riuniti 1984, pp. 40–41 (S. Kracauer. The Detective Novel. A Philosophical Treatise, Italian translation by R. Cristin, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 1984, pp. 40–41), 2009, comprises sheets of paper for three detective stories by Edgar Allan Poe, and yet many of the pages are printed on top of one another, making the story indecipherable. Here, the artist invites the viewer to discover a secret mechanism or structure. It’s tempting to find the cryptic relationships between these pieces, but it’s rewarding as well simply to allow oneself to be led along by the hypnotic rhythm of the exhibition.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.