“Violenza D’Avanguardia” (Violence of the Avant-Garde), the title of Seb Patane’s first solo show in Italy, refers to a phrase coined by the founders of Lotta Continua, the far-left political movement that emerged in Italy in the 1970s. References to such sensational events and moments are only one point on the path that connects this artist, now a resident of London, to the country of his birth. Patane extracts photographs from period newspapers and chooses nineteenth-century prints, to which he applies graphic flourishes. As a result, the selected images become vehicles for fresh meanings, as if he were pointing the emotional power of history in new directions. One work shows an enlargement of a newspaper photo of the January 16, 1968, arrest of Luigi Bobbio, one of the founders of Lotta Continua. Patane’s intervention: obscuring Bobbio’s eyes with a simple black strip, in a classic censorship gesture. The act is minimal but surprising. Carried out on such a large-scale photo, the black strip acquires its own specific power, and by rendering the protagonist’s face unrecognizable, Patane’s gesture makes the person under arrest no longer simply Bobbio, but anyone wishing to oppose an unjust system. Off to the side, a group of works of varying dimensions complete Patane’s voyage from past to future. Here, too, a series of transformations of existing images provokes a surprising sequence of effects, which the artist again achieves by overlaying ink or small collages on prints taken from Victorian-era magazines. But this isn’t all. In the second room of the gallery, where there are no works on the walls, the floor-bound The Guilty Versus Monsieur Carnot, 2007, stands out. The installation is made from two sheets of medium-density fiberboard that are covered with images taken from album covers and graphic interventions that bring to mind the iconography of war. This work is another allusion to the Anni di Piombo, or Years of Lead—the period of terrorism in Italy from the 1970s to the early 1980s—and to the somber fascination with war that Patane cites and then annuls. Meanwhile, a series of loudspeakers hidden in the gallery ceiling explode with the installation sound track that gives the show its title. Among the loudest noises, one can perceive police sirens, gates violently slammed shut, and the din produced by an eruption, transformed into a sequence of electronic sounds.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
