“Red Comet”
FLUXIA GALLERY
Via Ciro Menotti, 9,
February 10–March 27
View of “Red Comet,” 2010. Background: Giulio Frigo, Eclisse d’icona (Eclipse of the Icon, detail), 2010. Foreground: Sophie Bueno-Boutellier, Full Moon Meditation, 2010.
Installed high on a wall in this group exhibition is a mysterious painting that, on close observation, proves to depict a sacred image from the Orthodox Christian tradition. The canvas is covered in black paint, with the sole exception of a hand, which recalls the act of benediction––ring finger united with the thumb, a symbol of the convergence of human and divine nature. Some threads emerge from the hand and delimit a space; they represent the perspectival lines of the original painting that the emerging Italian artist Giulio Frigo has expanded into the gallery space for this work, which is titled Eclisse d’icona (Eclipse of the Icon), 2010.
Visitors must use caution while negotiating the intricate system of threads here to view an adjacent installation by the French artist Sophie Bueno-Boutellier. Full Moon Meditation, 2010, consists of a woolen prayer rug that intersects with a sheet of gold leaf, on which rest a series of mud balls decreasing in size, as if they were part an unknown ritual. The third artist in this show, the London-based Athanasios Argianas, has created a sculpture of different metals––aluminum, brass, and copper––that are combined to express their symbolic potential in his Unstable Object 3—silent version, 2010. Argianas’s work most obviously adds to the exhibition’s intention to explore its “space” as a field of forces through an encounter of various energies.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
— Marco Tagliafierro
Urs Lüthi
MACRO - MUSEO D'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA ROMA
Via Reggio Emilia 54
December 17–April 5
Urs Lüthi, “Just Another Story About Leaving” (detail), 1974–2006, twenty-five black-and-white photographs, each 24 x 16 1/2".
Urs Lüthi’s latest exhibition short-circuits the artist’s practice in an infinite play of references and self-quotations. The show, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero and Elena Forin, is a panorama that opens onto Lüthi’s life and work, which has always questioned the boundaries between public and private spheres and the limits of art. “Just Another Story About Leaving,” 1974–2006, a photographic series that gives the exhibition its title, is emblematic of Lüthi’s modus operandi, where his central concern is self-representation and transformation, typical of poetics pertaining to the “body as language” but exaggerated by an ironically self-referential narcissism that activates a disturbing artistic-existential voyage. The work brings to mind the identity-related nomadism that, since Duchamp and Claude Cahun, has passed through the territories of art––I am thinking here of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Luigi Ontani, and Orlan.
There are various residual traces of the artist’s body in the show, as in Autoritratto a mani vuote (Self-Portrait with Empty Hands), 2009, a sculpture that draws on the iconography of the religious figure with certain destabilizing elements: distressing posture, clown’s nose. The piece inhabited various places in Rome before being definitively “consecrated,” at the end of a physical and metaphoric journey, at MACRO, where it now stands. Here as in the rest of the show, Lüthi’s aesthetic strategy embraces the space of the double, yet he implies a paradox that never leads to a definitive result and ceaselessly acts in the reconfiguration of an equilibrium, of an encounter and relationship––intermittent but always different––between viewer and work, between those who see and that which is seen.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
— Eugenio Viola
Lorna Macintyre
KUNSTHAUS BASELLAND
St. Jakob-Strasse 170,
January 21–March 21
Lorna Macintyre, Neil, 2009, four gelatin-silver prints, stainless steel, 18 7/8 x 24 3/8".
Many contemporary artists make work that evokes the much-handled adjective poetic; surprisingly few, however, make use of actual poetry. Glasgow-based artist Lorna Macintyre falls into both camps, and with remarkable relish. The title of her latest exhibition, “Form and Freedom,” is gleaned from a William Carlos Williams phrase; many of the sculptures, photographs, and videos that compose it refer to T. S. Eliot’s seminal poems Four Quartets (1936–42) and The Waste Land (1922). When Macintyre’s works do not explicitly quote these texts, they make implicit reference to lyric poetry’s dominant themes: the seasons, the elements, and an ever-mysterious nature that is nearly noir in the darkness of its magic properties.
Four new sculptural works each embody an element: A series of interlocking copper triangles, dangling down a wall, stands for fire; one steel cable and one aluminum one, titled Words Move, Music Moves, 2009, descend from the ceiling like attenuated bolts of lightning and stand for air. Three short videos offer more literal poetic fragments: a shadow moving across a wall, as well as dappled blue and green foliage shimmering in the wind. The videos are saved from sheer preciousness by being sped up and looped; the intimacy of the caught moment is given levity by the jittery, jagged speed with which that moment must play on infinitely.
Not all Macintyre’s works are saved from tweeness. Several sculptures in various metals (a silver egg, driftwood painted gold) set atop rough wooden pedestals seem ripe for a Celtic seaside gift shop, with their alchemical referents and New Age titles. But Macintyre is discerning enough to often be sincere and surprising both. An installation of cyanotypes exemplifies this: A brown envelope, exposed to sunlight, offers shadowy dark blue forms; a large piece of paper, exposed to moonlight, results in a milky blue field streaked with starlike spots. Between these prints, a spare arrangement offers a blue photogram with a white circle burned into it, a glass, and a snapshot of a melon against a blue door. The work’s meaning is inseparable from its making and as carefully selected as words in a line of poetry. How to describe it? Poetic, indeed.
— Quinn Latimer
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