Nunzio

GALLERIA BONOMO BARI
Via Nicolò Dell'Arca, 19
April 20–June 30

Nunzio, Senza Titolo (Untitled), 2012, wood, 89 x 45 x 23”.

In three concurrent shows, Nunzio presents recent sculptures in wood and lead that reveal a dialogue between luminosity and darkness, weight and lightness. At Alessandra Bonomo, Senza Titolo (Untitled), 2012—a large sculpture made from eighty-six oak slats fastened to the floor—evokes a prehistoric skeleton or the framework of a boat. Yet what we see is no longer wood, but rather its fossil. The work’s surface has been scorched with flame, and the wood’s most volatile fibers are burned; the fire functions as a veil, a protection that renders the wood rot-proof and also keeps it alive and unaltered on the inside. Each strip is different, carved from large wooden planks with the same curvature, and each naturally holds its tilted position. Curved and flexible, the black slats delineate alternations of solid and void, a vibrating space in continuous mutation, like a breath.

Another Senza Titolo, 2012, consisting of two slender and towering columns that face each other, draws the eye into the folds of the burned wood, like small abysses of darkness. The surfaces curl around themselves like pages of a book one has scrolled through, or they are folded like origami, playing with the idea of opposites, with circular coordinates and broken lines following along with brief intervals. The same structural synthesis of dynamic torsions between surfaces that reflect light and those that absorb shadow is magnified on a large scale in Senza Titolo, 2011, exhibited in Bari. At Valentina Bonomo, Nunzio’s lead bas-reliefs are also a reflection on luminosity. Lead is a contradictory metal—soft, ductile, but also very heavy. Capturing the moment when the metal is unstable, he shapes it into geometric forms that barely protrude and on which the light creates corners and indentations, designs waves or metaphysical architectures. It is a body of work that, in its totality, indicates how Nunzio roams within a context articulated with sculptural references, from Pino Pascali to Minimalism, from which he summons a narrative poetic delicacy mixed with conceptual rigor.

This exhibition is also on view in Rome at Valentina Bonomo, Via del Portico d'Ottavia, 13, until June 30 and Galleria Alessandra Bonomo, Via del Gesù, 62, until May 25.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Ida Panicelli

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi

HANGARBICOCCA
Via Privata Chiese 2
April 12–June 10

View of “NON NON NON,” 2012.

The watercolors at HangarBicocca by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, created in the 1980s, comment on daily life and travels and Armenian fables, as well as on seven video installations by the artist team also on view. While the watercolors are not exactly storyboards for the films, they offer a kaleidoscope of references that visually amplify individual frames. Mixing imaginative richness with an anthropological observation of reality, the watercolors share a narrative and poetic structure with the films, which reveal an anthropologist’s and amateur’s eye for the underprivileged and the colonized and which demonstrate that no framing is ever innocent. The two artists expose the historical power of the gaze that has enchained peoples and cultures throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, and the role that camera techniques have played in the radicalization of their reality. In an emblematic scene from one of the films, Frammenti elettrici (Electric Fragments, 2002–2004), a bourgeois-looking woman adjusts a Roma child’s cap, as if she were preparing him to pose. Originating from an amateur home movie from the 1940s, when the Roma returned to Italy after the war, the found footage was shot on Lake Como—splendid and worldly, but also eerie in that it was the setting for Mussolini’s capture. In the woman’s gesture, and in its staging for the movie camera, the tragic nature of history seems to vanish. The show’s films present a dismissal of history, profiling the ruins of twentieth-century progress and science. Through archival images and powerful editing, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi have created a sorrowful and epic fresco that speaks to loss of innocence.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Alessandra Pioselli

Andreas Angelidakis

GLORIA MARIA GALLERY
Via Watt 32
April 18–May 28

Andreas Angelidakis, Domesticated Mountain Room (detail), 2012, boxes, tape, dimensions variable. Installation view.

A pile of large cardboard boxes in the center of the gallery greets visitors to this exhibition by the Athens-based artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis. Upon careful observation, it becomes clear that the heap is an angular igloo, or even a mountain, which visitors can enter by passing through a cavity on either side. From the inside, it is evident that the structure could be inhabited, as there are two chairs and two benches, which vaguely evoke the radical sensibility of Ettore Sottsass. The assembly, which is held together by strips of black adhesive tape, consists entirely of packaging used for commerce; the white FedEx boxes reappear most noticeably. Titled Domesticated Mountain Room, 2012, the work alludes to motley principles of functionality that normally are second nature to design and, obviously, architecture, but it also expresses a spirit that is decidedly “other” with regard to conventional design, even that which is presented as radically experimental.

This show, curated by Maria Cristina Didero, also includes architectural plans for this installation and other such residential structures; the diagrams hang on the gallery’s bare cement walls, along with six videos that describe the works’ functional potential. Inside the installation of boxes, looped video is also projected. Here a collage of images—both moving and static, some produced by the artist, some found on the Web—depict a slow fall of boxes that, in turn, come together to compose an ideal dwelling.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Marco Tagliafierro

“D’après Giorgio”

FONDAZIONE GIORGIO E ISA DE CHIRICO
31 Piazza di Spagna
January 27–January 27

View of “D’après Giorgio,” 2012. Lower right: Olaf Nicolai, Lettere dallo studiolo (Letters from the Study), 2012.

Piazza di Spagna is among the most popular places to go when in Rome, yet very few people visit the nearby seventeenth-century Palazzetto dei Borgognoni, where Giorgio de Chirico spent the final thirty years of his life with his wife Isabella Pakszwer Far. Within the walls of this carefully restored apartment, curator Luca Lo Pinto has organized the yearlong exhibition “D’après Giorgio” (After Giorgio). Focusing on the relationship between history and memory, and between intimacy and public exposure, the show presents works by artists from different generations and creates an expanded narrative centered around this complex key figure of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

Walking through the seductive rooms of the household, we encounter traces of de Chirico’s presence: Luca Vitone’s Natura morta con Punt & Mes (Still Life with Punt & Mes) (all works cited, 2012), for instance, offers an unfinished tramezzino sandwich and slice of cake accompanied by a bottle of Punt & Mes––the elder artist’s favorite drink. For Lettere dallo studiolo (Letters from the Study), Olaf Nicolai has placed a typewriter in the monkish bedroom on the second floor; it is perhaps an invitation for the audience to write a letter just as de Chirico often did in the middle of the night. Luigi Ontani’s SenilSeminodo is a d’après of Ontani himself: It is essentially an update of his 1978 seminude self-portrait that in turn appropriated de Chirico’s famous work of 1945. This new photograph rests against a large unfinished canvas in the studio; the image of the aged body of Ontani seems quite comparable to the one the departed artist made of himself.

The show, which will expand and change during the course of the year, is visible solely through guided tours directed by the staff of the museum, who have been trained to interweave the history of de Chirico’s practice and personality with these new interventions in his home. Facts, fascinations, obsessions, and research here blend into a new narrative, one that is at once creative and didactic, evocative and conceptual.

— Ilaria Gianni

Aleksandra Domanović

KUNSTHALLE BASEL
Steinenberg 7
April 1–May 27

View of “From yu to me,” 2012.

Not simply SMS-speak, the title of Aleksandra Domanović’s current solo show, “From yu to me,” is a shorthand way to describe edifice trended into obsolescence. In 2010, Yugoslavia’s national top-level domain, .yu, was dissolved, and the independent Montenegro christened its own distinct top-level domain: .me. Cast aside, .yu as an administrative autonomy is now but a ghost of itself, alongside the former republic and the monuments that accredited its authority. In Domanović’s show, two forms of public space in the Balkans—politically motivated architecture and Internet structures—are merged in an attempt to to suss out their shared attributes.

In her ongoing series of “Paper Stacks,” 2009–, a stream of publicly shared images of seaside holiday resorts turned refugee camps and football games gone riotous are dissected into pixels, printed full bleed onto the razor-thin edges of A4 and A3 sheets piled into delicate stelae. An image is formed on the lateral sides of the stacks through the accumulation of thousands of sheets. In another room, the pure modernist white multiples of Bogdan Bogdanović’s 1961 Partisan’s Necropolis are slenderized into Prilep Nymph, 2012, a playful Styrofoam sculpture finished in turquoise Tadelakt. In 19:30, 2010–11, dozens of 1990s-era Yugoslav nightly news jingles, remixed by DJs into techno beats, set the tempo of a dual-channel video juxtaposing the original newscast intros with scenes of recent raves throughout the former republic. All the while, the crisp narrator of Turbo Sculpture, 2012, explains how a collective identity crisis led Hollywood stars and other heroes of the Western world—Rocky, Bruce Lee, and Johnny Depp—to become public monuments throughout the Balkans, as JPEGs pile atop each other on the cinema-size screen.

Eschewing nostalgia, Domanović continues the displacement of already stranded symbols, analytically melding them into a means to decipher the Balkans’ chaotically coded present. Notwithstanding the press release’s fallacious claim that a visit to Domanović’s website is more productive than a studio visit, the artist successfully intertwines forms of public space in such a way that they flow seamlessly.

— Alex Freedman