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

“Make Up”

A PALAZZO GALLERY
PIAZZA TEBALDO BRUSATO 35
December 15–March 11

View of “Make Up,” 2012.

Allegory may well be the underlying theme of “Make Up,” the group show at A Palazzo Gallery. If the exhibition’s title can mean “to apply cosmetics” or “to reconcile,” it can also mean “to invent”—and indeed, over the course of the eighteenth century, allegory became an occasion for inventing innumerable linguistic artifices. It is no accident that Mariuccia Casadio, curator of this show, has set the exhibition within the splendid frame of the eighteenth-century palace housing the gallery; her decision demonstrates a critical awareness and philological spirit that is unusual in our time.

In many of the exhibition’s rooms, Casadio’s curatorial project yields authoritative results, characterized by a triumphant display of whimsical work by thirteen artists. Standouts include wonderful sculptures Dr. Lakra created for the occasion; for one piece, the artist used blue ballpoint pen to draw tattoos all over a statuette of a 1950s pinup girl. A series of works by Maurizio Anzeri—vintage photographic portraits on which the artist has embroidered abstract motifs in colored and sometimes metallic threads—are scattered throughout the exhibition as if their goal were to guide the viewer through the various surprises that await. Meanwhile, Benny Chirco has used two Baroque-style end tables as supports for a series of portraits that document the progressive evolution of a famous portrait by Giovanni Boldini titled Mademoiselle de Nemidoff, 1908, reproduced by Chirco several times such that each successive painting shows the subject transforming into a young, seductive man, through what one might call a morphing done in analog. But one installation is particularly breathtaking: In a room otherwise adorned with stuccoed details, mirrors, and frescoes, the largest of several undecorated walls is the site of a video projection by John Bock, Fischgratenmelkstand kippt ins Hohlengleichnis Refugium (Fish-bone-milking-stand Collapses into the Allegory of the Cave Refuge), 2008. Bock’s piece immortalizes two protagonists—one female, the other male—in rococo dress, interacting in a public bath. Shot in a brilliant, changing green hue, the projection reverberates throughout the baroque space and lights up the surrounding mirrors, which, as if by magic, come to resemble small monitors.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Marco Tagliafierro

Rob Johannesma

MUSEO MARINO MARINI
Piazza di San Pancrazio
February 4–April 12

Rob Johannesma, World-Wielding, 2011, Ink-jet print, 32 x 20'. Installation view: Museo Marino Marini.

Rob Johannesma’s solo Italian museum debut is split between the Museo Marino Marini and AR-GE Kunst in Bolzano. (The latter show closed on March 17.) For the exhibitions, Johannesma’s created a monumental ink-jet print, both titled World-Wielding, 2011. The point of departure for the piece is a news photograph of a skull and other human remains on a meadow, shot in 1995 near Srebrenica, a site of a massacre during the Bosnian War. Johannesma digitally rephotographed the original image (a small newspaper clipping) hundreds of times and then used small portions of his shots to re-create the original picture. The extraordinary result is an enormous mosaic, full of gaps and chromatic jumps. Its complexity alludes to the difficult task of deciphering that awaits anyone who sets out in search of historical truth. But the work is also a flagrant quotation of the vanitas genre of classical painting.

The parallel between the Western iconographic tradition and news images continues in an 2012 untitled work––a table on which the artist has arranged newsprint clippings, juxtaposing photographs of current events and reproductions of Leonardo, Tintoretto, Manet, and many others. As in Aby Warburg’s celebrated Mnemosyne Atlas of 1928–29, the work indicates the survival of particular iconographic archetypes. While news photographs can be rapidly consumed, the artist seems to suggest this is because they obey schemes that have long been present in our collective memory.

The exhibition at the Museo Marino Marini includes three excellent videos created between 1998 and 2010. They are “landscape studies” in which, once again, the contemporary reveals the historical in a filigree pattern, as in the tryptic Cinque Terre, 2004, based on photographs of rocky landscapes that recall the backdrop of Da Vinci’s The Virgin of the Rocks. In an untitled work from 1998, Johannesma scans a photograph bit by bit with his camera’s lens. Throughout all of the works, Johannesma’s conceptual investigation of images is based on his scrutiny of their primary materials; indeed, through rephotographing, scanning, superimposing, and so on, he searches for meaning by zeroing in on structure and breaking it down.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Simone Menegoi

Daniel Silver

GALLERIA SUZY SHAMMAH
via San Fermo / via Moscova 25
January 24–March 10

View of “Daniel Silver,” 2012.

Marble busts sit on vertically stacked tree trunks in Daniel Silver’s current solo show. The exhibition occupies a room that the gallery has previously used as an office. Here, the London-based artist also presents a bronze bustlike sculpture resting on a pale wooden base, and a long white sculpture made of plaster and rubber that seems to depict a dying figure or, from further away, the lid of a sarcophagus. This monument seems to participate in a transformative process unfolding slowly over time.

Indeed, it seems that the London-based artist is not concerned with making work that offers a stabile or established form, and nothing in the show seems to have been decided a priori. There are multiple references at play (particularly historical ones); yet Silver’s intention is not to create an atlas of memory but rather to activate the phenomenology of recollection. The artist has previously lived in Israel and Africa, and perhaps this is why he seems interested in the ways in which various symbols and signs belonging to very different cultures can disintegrate. Moreover, he is adept at finding their common origin, discovering the glyphs that constitute the DNA of these forms. On the walls of the gallery, Silver has hung pieces of brightly colored fabric, which look as if they are from Africa. Yet their textures resonate perfectly with the marble sculptures, as if they had always been perceived together.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Marco Tagliafierro

Gianni Pettena

ENRICO FORNELLO
Via Massimiano 25
January 19–March 16

View of “Gianni Pettena,” 2012. Installation view, Galleria Federico Luger.

In a pair of solo shows, Gianni Pettena––artist, architect (or more precisely anarchitetto, or “anarchitect”), and leading figure in the Italian late-1960s and early-’70s “radical architecture” movement––presents a selection of early works and a series of more recent creations. Conceived as a “score” to be read and interpreted, the exhibitions successfully establish a channel of communication and complement one another. Moreover, they reveal the theoretical continuity as well as the command of materials and space that have always distinguished the practice of this extraordinary experimentalist.

At Enrico Fornello, a display of framed photographs and drawings documents Pettena’s architectural interventions in the United States in the ’70s. Clay House, 1972, and Ice House II, 1971, show Pettena’s conversion of two suburban homes in Salt Lake City and Minneapolis, which he covered with clay and ice, respectively, thus merging the natural and built landscape into one. The show also features Io sono la spia (I Am the Spy), 1973, a diptych composed of a silk screen that bears the title phrase and a black-and-white picture of the architects and designers (among them Alessandro Mendini, Gaetano Pesce, and members of the groups Archizoom and Superstudio) who gathered together in the editorial offices of Casabella magazine that year to form the “Global Tools” collective. The show also includes a new wall installation, Human Face, 2012, made with several handmade balls of clay that fit neatly into a niche.

Creating a seamless dialogue with that work, Pettena presents Human Wall, 2012, at Federico Luger. It is a barrier of clay that will be modified by visitors during the course of the exhibition. In addition to other older photographic works and one new video, the Luger show is completed by another architectural project, Breathing Architecture, 2012. Here, a surface portion of the wall is slightly detached, as if it requires separation from the rest of the structure in order to actually exist.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

This exhibition is also on view at Galleria Federico Luger, via Circo 1, until March 16.

— Vincenzo de Bellis

Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder

GIO MARCONI GALLERY
via Tadino 15
February 22–March 31

View of "COMCORRÖDER," 2012.

An endoskeleton of sorts traverses the interior of Milan’s Giò Marconi gallery, appears to continue right through the gallery’s wall, and reemerges in the interior of the Kaleidoscope art space a short distance away. The structure is created via the superimposition and juxtaposition of various “vertebrae”—portions of panels used to create temporary walls, reassembled in the form of shelving. On these shelves at Marconi are paintings on Mylar by Kerstin Brätsch; their analogs at Kaleidoscope support Adele Röder’s scraps of thick fabric, installed in a way that exhibits their structural rigidity first and foremost, but also their pliability. The show compares different design worlds, featuring exhibition design and other contributions from UNITED BROTHERS, Martino Gamper, Lucas Knipscher, and Lydia Rodrigues, in addition to Brätsch and Röder’s collective DAS INSTITUT, which features the duo in their usual display of artistic teamwork. In reality, the two projects are officially distinct entities: “Glow Rod Tanning with . . . ,” Brätsch’s first solo show at Marconi, and “COMCORRÖDER,” Röder’s project at Kaleidoscope. The totality of artworks here, however, becomes an absolutely organic whole. Brätsch’s paintings, exhibited with the help of magnets, metal bars, and self-supporting structures, and partially illuminated by neon light, seem a natural counterpart to Röder’s textiles, which evoke the work of Sonia Delaunay, their thoughtful use of colors seeming like an expression of a corporeal phenomenon.

This exhibition is also on view at Kaleidoscope Project Space, 10 Via Masera, until March 31.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Marco Tagliafierro

Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs

GALLERIA RICCARDO CRESPI
Via Mellerio 1
February 24–April 7

Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, Ghost 2, 2012, silver gelatin print, 47 x 36 3/8".

“Fine di un’era” (“End of an Era”), the title of this solo show by the artist team Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, refers to the decline of analog photography and the romanticism that underlies a nostalgia for a world of soon-to-be-extinct technologies and mechanical devices. The Swiss duo’s ironic gaze chooses to revive the sense of wonder associated with the dawn of photography, using long exposure times to shoot structures set up outdoors in nature or constructed in the studio and placed on a slowly rotating wheel. In the resulting silver gelatin prints, bodies are as ethereal and transparent as columns of smoke: See, for instance, the “Sculpture Workshop” and “Ghost” series (all works cited, 2012). The magic associated with the photographic image—along with a predilection for simultaneously hiding and revealing the strategies at work behind the creation of such images—seem to drive Onorato and Krebs’s research, informing many photographs in the show, from Demolition to Twin Rotations. The two artists expose the construction of such images, their imaginative fictions, their production context (the studio), and the tools and tricks of the trade. They do so by supplementing their photographs with installations consisting of cameras modeled from ceramic and wood. In some of these pieces (Clay Camera 180 mm and Clay Camera 360 mm), the cameras self-reflexively observe one another; in others (Clay Camera 210 mm) they point at a black screen onto which no images will ever be projected.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Alessandra Pioselli

Nate Lowman

MASSIMO DE CARLO
Via Giovanni Ventura, 5
April 11–May 12

View of “Swiss Cheese and The Doors: A One Night Stand,” 2012.

Visitors must push open a pair of old church doors to enter into “Swiss Cheese and The Doors: A One Night Stand,” Nate Lowman’s current exhibition in Milan, which revolves around the absurd semiotic investigation of doors. Once inside they will find, above and to the sides of the entrance, Pointers Pointing (all works 2012), a sequence of found black-and-white images of people pointing their fingers at some unidentified thing in space. For these works Lowman applied alkyd enamel onto canvas, a technique that mimics the typical texture of silk-screened canvases. On the back wall is another series of paintings in various sizes—all pictures of women, some famous (Nicole Kidman, Michelle Obama), others unknown.

A second set of doors—this time of the swinging, saloon-style sort—leads to another, smaller gallery, which has a completely different tone. Here the lighting consists of spotlights that “circle” the pieces. A series of neon lights also installed on the ceiling progressively range from yellow-orange to blue, seeming to allude to the daily passage from dawn to dusk. The works in this room include an old table (Under the Table, Over the Counter), a canvas bearing an image of Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison from the movie The Doors (The Doors), another painting shaped like a slice of Swiss cheese (Negroni Blackout), some old fuel dispensers, and, again, a door.

The exhibition concludes with final gallery that displays three canvases shaped into pine tree car-fresheners. Oversize and absurd, they are all painted with a stars and stripes motif, like the American flag, but only one is colored red, white, and blue (You Essay), while the two others have the colors of the Italian (Uhtzalian) and Rastafarian (Jamaican Me Crazy) flags. Like the rest of the show, they revel in iconographic absurdity.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Vincenzo de Bellis

Michael Fliri and Asta Gröting

GALLERIA RAFFAELLA CORTESE
Via Stradella 7
February 16–May 12

View of “In Between,” 2012.

“In Between” is the second two-person show organized by this gallery to connect artists from different generations. (The first opened last December with Anna Halprin and Daria Martin.) The current exhibition features Michael Fliri and Asta Gröting, both of whom address the theme of the body through presence and absence. The show is calibrated on the relationships established between works that express definite physicality and those that convey dematerialized bodies. Gröting’s 2005 video Shadow, in which her furtive shadow wanders around a space for an hour and twenty minutes, establishes a dialogue with Fliri’s 2012 installation Bilateral-Simmetry. The latter is a large, soft, and vaguely anthropomorphic form clad in a thin film of green latex; imprints of the artist’s knuckles are pressed into the surface.

The solid/void dichotomy underlies all the pieces on view, which mingle subtle references with one another and create a space laden with signs and traces that allude to a fleeting dimension of the body, and to what is unsaid. During the opening evening of the show, Fliri performed The wrong turn offered unexpected discoveries, 2011, for which he sat in a box, exposed to view. While he was clearly apparent to viewers, at times it seemed he was negating his physical presence, maintaining contact with the outside world only through the long artificial tail he wore.

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

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

Gavin Russom

GALLERIA FONTI
Via Chiaia 229
February 10–April 10

View of “Zombi (scratch mix),” 2012.

For his current solo exhibition, musician, producer, and artist Gavin Russom presents a heterogeneous gathering of mixed-media works, which he made without with his frequent collaborator, Delia Gonzalez. The attitude that underpins Russom’s interdisciplinary practice––including his meandering experimental music––is ironically reasserted by the show’s title: “Zombi (scratch mix).”

Here Russom stages a symbolic scene that is equally as inspired by a cult horror movie (Lucio Fulci’s 1979 Zombie 2) as it is by disquieting events. The opening scene of Fulci’s film shows an abandoned yacht floating in New York’s East River, the Twin Towers still standing tall in the background. For his part, Russom presents the towers in Vision (all works 2012) as if they were dressed up for Halloween, one as a witch and the other as a Native American. Meanwhile, The Messenger, a cardboard boat set adrift, appears in another room of the gallery. This work evokes Arnold Böcklin’s 1880 painting Isle of the Dead. As in that piece, a vessel seems to have come to the end of a silent, solitary journey, arriving at a non-site, a desolate landscape. Throughout the show, Russom replicates this atemporal panorama, probing the dark folds of reality and immersing it in a spectral atmosphere.

A series of drawings, deliberately naive and ingenuous in feeling, are installed along the “shoreline” of this bleak, unreal vista. It is a metaphoric landing, an attempt to return to origins and almost to liberate the unconscious. But this reference to otherness has a rival attraction in the disguise adopted to mask one of the most tragic symbols of our uncertain era.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Eugenio Viola

Ariel Orozco

FEDERICA SCHIAVO GALLERY
Piazza Montevecchio 16
February 10–March 25

Ariel Orozco, Untitled (Problema) (Untitled [Problem]) (detail), 2012, fifty steel drains, plastic plug, metal chain, dimensions variable. Installation view.

A precarious installation of a gray Faber-Castell colored pencil balancing on its tip on a corner of this gallery’s reception desk introduces the viewer to Ariel Orozco’s “Detrás del cristal” (Behind the Crystal). Seized in place, Gris (Gray) (all works 2012) imparts the first statement of this fluid and complex show, which explores the paradoxes and contradictions within neoliberal society.

The rooms of the gallery appear as chapters of a story narrating the exhaustion of luxury and the unstable relationship between necessity and exploitation. For example, the perfectly contained abundance of desert sand in the 3,400 drinking glasses of Untitled (Sed) (Untitled [Thirst]), which are placed on the floor in shapes that recall continents and islands, paradoxically evokes privation and loss. The distinct missing element of water appears here, surprisingly, in a large beach ball in Oceano (Ocean). The work presents one of our major natural––and increasingly scarce––resources as unreachable.

Nearby, sixty drains of various sizes are installed in the floor while only one plug, which might stop a potential inundation, is obtainable. Untitled (Problema) (Untitled [Problem]) highlights the impossibility of finding a single solution to the multitude of problems caused by the constant capitalization of Earth’s resources. Another, untitled, work features a firework resting on the ground. Here the spectator is faced with the latent danger bound in this solitary article. Through such subtle interventions, Orozco’s show offers a general sense of uncertainty, of our precarious current situation, and perhaps of our future condition.

— Ilaria Gianni

Peter Linde Busk and Tomaso De Luca

MONITOR
Palazzo Sforza Cesarini, Via Sforza Cesarini 43a-44
February 25–April 28

View of “No Pasarán” (They Shall Not Pass), 2012.

It is difficult today to find artists who are able to successfully come to terms with the art-historical and cultural traditions that preceded them, and even harder to find any who can translate this work into creative actions through an expressive medium. The Danish artist Peter Linde Busk is one of the rare cases who accomplish this. Using painting as his favored communicative tool, he journeys to a past with rather generous boundaries, crowded with both late-medieval and avant-garde allusions (from Die Brücke to Abstract Expressionism, Cobra to art brut). These, in turn, are connected to a boundless constellation of other references, both literary (Baudelaire, Rilke, Rimbaud) and psychological (Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill, 1922). This adeptness is apparent in Linde Busk’s first solo show in Italy, “No Pasarán” (They Shall Not Pass), where he exhibits six works on canvas, six works on paper, four works on copper, two woodcuts, and a ceramic piece. It becomes understandable how the aforementioned iconographic references could be supplemented by many others, some of which are tied unconsciously to the Italian twentieth-century tradition (which it would be interesting to see him confront directly one day, as evidence of an unusual wealth of intentions in his work).

A confrontation with the past also occurs, although in a different way, in the work of Tomaso De Luca, in his first solo show at Monitor. He presents The Monument, 2011, a visual diary from his recent sojourn in Rome, during which he recorded his impressions of its numerous sculptures on simple pieces of paper that are hung here with nails. Reinterpreting the monuments graphically and chromatically, he seems to suspend them in time and space. In other words, De Luca induces the same physical and intellectual disorientation that has frequently recurred along his brief but already intense creative path. His output establishes a dialogue with Linde Busk’s (particularly his metahistorical analysis), emphasizing the experimental tone that characterizes the attitude behind this exhibition at Monitor.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Pier Paolo Pancotto

“A Painting Cycle”

NOMAS FOUNDATION
Viale Somalia 33
April 19–May 3

Luca Bertolo, Proof, 2007, oil on canvas, 86 1/2 x 78 3/4".

Each of the invited artists in “A Painting Cycle” offers an original take on painting today, from both a technical and a semantic standpoint, representing some of the many aspects of this broad and complex panorama. The exhibition, curated by Cecilia Canziani and Ilaria Gianni, consists of five installments that will be presented sequentially over the course of two and a half months. The first of these, which was on view for the second week in March, featured British artist Jessica Warboys, who merges pictorial gesture and performance in works like the video Stone Throat, 2011, the three-dimensional composition Motion Motif, 2012, and her “Sea Paintings” canvases, 2011, which the artist drenched in colored pigment and then immersed in the sea until the water naturally modified their surface. Similarly, German artist Julia Schmidt’s Basement, 2010, and Ufficio postale [Post Office], 2012, which were presented next, translate scenes of daily life into flat, uniform chromatic planes that recall the look of shadows, all dense with mystery. As with Warboys, Schmidt shows that even in our cyber era, it is possible for a traditional artistic practice to help us investigate our lives—technology is not always necessary. The third installment of this exhibition features Christopher Orr’s imaginary voyage into art history, which is here condensed into five small paintings; each seems like a preparatory sketch, with a private and experimental quality. In Nocturne, 2007, and The Light That Fails, 2010, for example, the figures dissolve into an unfinished state—as if part of an ancient memory. Polish painter Agnieszka Brzezanska mixes abstract and figurative forms, recalling the Surrealist aesthetic, especially that of Max Ernst. Italian artist Luca Bertolo will complete the series in May. Beyond the individual installments, “A Painting Cycle” should be understood as a whole for its clinical rigor—less an artistic exhibition than a historical and social study of painting that reflects on the value of pictorial expression today.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Pier Paolo Pancotto

Iván Navarro

FONDAZIONE VOLUME!
Via Di San Francesco Di Sales 86
February 3–May 5

Iván Navarro, Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog), 2012, neon lights, one-way mirrors, bricks, 63 x 31 1/2".

The drama of World War II and the dark, tragic atmosphere of the 1945 film Rome, Open City—which depicts the period from September 1943 to June 1944, when Nazis occupied Rome—are central to the installation Iván Navarro has conceived for his debut solo show, curated by Antonio Arévalo at the Fondazione Volume! Until now the artist has been an infrequent presence on the Italian exhibition scene––excluding his participation in the 2009 Venice Biennale, where he represented his native country of Chile. This makes his current show in Rome, a project inspired by the historical and logistical context of the location, quite notable.

Inspired by the cellars, underground burrows, and tunnels that became places of refuge for Romans seeking to escape political or racial persecutions during the German occupation (or that in some instances, on the contrary, became synonymous with death, as in the massacre of Fosse Ardeatine), Navarro has installed seven circular, square, and triangular cavities in brick and cement, similar in appearance to wells. Inside he has placed neon words that, through a complex system of mirrors, are infinitely amplified in volume and, by extension, in meaning. They read ODIO, OCCHIO, ECCO, ECO, EX, BECCO, ECCEDIO (hatred, eye, here, echo, former, beak, massacre). Using the language of light, as he frequently does, Navarro parses out the historically contingent and geographically specific meaning of each word. The title of the show, “Nacht und Nebel” (Night and Fog), is inspired by the words that are sung by Alberich in the third scene of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold and were tragically borrowed by Adolf Hitler for his December 1941 decree that called for the disappearance and death “in the night and the fog” of those who had acted against the Third Reich in the occupied territories. Thus the title provides a grim confirmation of the artist’s sinister allusions.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Pier Paolo Pancotto

Jean-Marc Bustamante

FRENCH ACADEMY OF ROME, VILLA MEDICI
Viale Trinità dei Monti, 1
February 5–May 6

View of “Jean-Marc Bustamante,” 2012.

With this wide-ranging retrospective of work from the past thirty years, Jean-Marc Bustamante is making up for his absence––with the exception of his participation in the French pavilion during the 2003 Venice Biennale––from the contemporary Italian art scene. Curated by Éric de Chassey, this show offers a fresh reading of the entire creative path of this French artist who, after training as a photographer and working with Denis Brihat and William Klein in the 1980s, became one of the pioneers of large-format color images and later went on to create three-dimensional installation and pictorial work, such as silk-screened images on monumental Plexiglas panels. The show is distinguished not only by its comprehensiveness, but also and above all by its close relationship with context. Indeed, the exhibition design is site-specific, as can be seen, for example, in the “Peintures” (Paintings) series, 2012, a sequence of paintings conceived specifically for the Villa Medici’s grand salon and inspired by the chromatic tones that Balthus chose for its walls.

A striking addition to the show is a group of nearly forty works by the seventeenth-century Flemish painter Pieter Jansz Saenredam, who is known for his exterior views and interior scenes. Although Bustamante employs different expressive means, like Saenredam he also addresses physical and psychological qualities of space. The intellectual exercise of pairing these two artists enables their works to establish an ideal dialogue, since both develop perspectival concepts that are rigorous but at the same time suspended from the quotidian reality to which they refer, almost to the point of abstraction. Thus Saenredam’s depictions of religious architecture alternate with Bustamante’s works that depict urban scenes (many from the early 1990s), in a play of visual and semantic references that hover between past and present, and which find an ideal venue in the historic Villa Medici.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Pier Paolo Pancotto

“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

Anna Hughes

ARTERICAMBI
Via A.Cesari, 10
February 28–April 14

Anna Hughes, Lights Out, 2012, oil and yarn on linen, 27 1/2 x 20”.

English painter Anna Hughes’s current solo show in Verona is titled “Waypoint,” but it could just as easily be called “Turning Point,” since it signals a rather significant step forward in her work. The artist’s basic ambition remains the same—to interpret the atmospheres of a certain type of romantic landscape painting from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the lens of a contemporary sensibility. Her predilection for creating easel paintings in oil on canvas also remains unchanged. The new works, however, indicate a decisive move toward abstraction. While her earlier works were clearly figurative—romantic scenes disturbed by incongruous presences, in the manner of Christopher Orr—the more recent canvases depict only cloudy skies in which the figuration is often at the point of dissolving into mere stains. Moreover, the painter has begun to intervene on the canvas by stitching small triangles and straight lines that cut her pictures in two like horizons, all bringing the materiality of the works to the fore and further weakening their illusion of depth. From this practice arise the most surprising works of the show, plain canvases on which the artist’s only intervention is the said stitching, in parallel lines or other minimal geometric shapes. This move might seem bizarre on Hughes’s part but is in fact consistent with her overall artistic practice, which emphasizes the sophisticated and, as Leonardo might have put it, “mental” nature of painting as anything but a reproduction of reality. Here Hughes echoes the ways in which the romantic poetics of the sublime have often been interpreted in twentieth-century painting—not in the form of figuration, but in terms of radical abstraction, as in research into the monochrome. These abstract works introduce a new level of complexity and challenge to Hughes’s work, and we await further developments with curiosity.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore

— Simone Menegoi

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

Daniel Gustav Cramer

KUNSTHAUS GLARUS
Im Volksgarten, Postfach 665
February 12–May 6

View of “Works,” 2012.

Daniel Gustav Cramer’s current exhibition is an elegantly articulate overview of his output from the past decade, and it offers an intense visual experience through its contemplative atmosphere. The show begins with the Berlin-based artist’s latest video, which is installed in a wide, dark room near the museum’s transparent entrance. Orrery, 2012, is a slow montage of texts and images that convey the story of Cramer’s visits to Melbourne and meetings with a hermitlike man who builds eighteenth-century mechanical devices to study the planets’ paths around the sun. Almost still, the work seems to suspend time, and it brings the viewer to the heart of Cramer’s constellation of artistic concerns, knitting abstraction with intimacy, archive with individual memory, science with mysticism.

In another section of the show, “Works,” Cramer has assembled a heterogeneous gathering of photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, publications, and works on paper. Associating images of ancient landscapes as in Untitled (Stonehenge) with a video focusing on the surface of a crater (Untitled [Crater]) and a book made of pages of pure colors (Untitled [Colour]) (all 2009), these pieces display Cramer’s expert use of diverse materials and shapes to compose a precise, geometric, and refined “atlas” to be physically experienced.

“The Infinite Library,” Cramer’s collaborative project with Haris Epaminonda, is presented on the lower level and proposes to go deeper into the artist’s world of references. This section is a spectacular display of unique books, precious sculptural objects made with pages from antique publications, which the artists have been meticulously crafting since 2007. They are inspired equally by Warburgian iconology and Jorge Luis Borges’s utopias.

— Yann Chateigné

Yüksel Arslan

KUNSTHALLE ZÜRICH AT MUSEUM BÄRENGASSE
Bärengasse 20 - 22
January 28–April 4

Yüksel Arslan, Arture 416, Man 57: General paralysis, 1990, mixed media on paper,
15 x 14”.

Given the exponentially burgeoning mass of data that we face every day, could one dare to read the world like an encyclopedia? A convincing affirmative answer can be found in the newly discovered work of Yüksel Arslan. Born in Istanbul in 1933, Arslan moved to Paris in 1962, where to this day he draws, paints, writes, and creates collages in reclusion, building his titanic opus.

“Artures,” his current exhibition, offers the most important survey of his work on paper outside Turkey since 1959, and reveals a life’s work that is as marked by contemporary trends as it is by his tremendous personal erudition in Western and Eastern sources. These are not just “paintings”; indeed, he refers to his work as “arture”––with subcategories contrearture, cinémature, autoarture––a coinage that combines the social and cultural realms. Based on countless specific microstudies over the decades––on topics from schizoanalysis to economic power relations to literature, music, and art––he has constructed a corpus that opens across the many small rooms here like the leaves of a giant World Book.

Body parts of human beings and animals––brains, eyes, genitals, hands, and other physiognomies––are at the heart of the show. Dispersed throughout these works are yellow and brown hues, which derive from experiments with plant and terrestrial pigments. This archaeology of knowledge is not without a subtle humor and quiet self-irony. In his unbridled will to read the world anew with drawings and notations that follow traces in the natural sciences and the arts, Yüksel Arslan reminds me of Raymond Pettibon. The two late-modern encyclopedists could have met in a fictional historical encounter in Zürich, perhaps with another like-minded fellow: James Joyce.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Hans Rudolf Reust