“Duetto” is a cross-generational exhibition showcasing the radical function of Giuseppe Chiari (Firenze, 1926-2007) and the multi-disciplinary apply of Luca Massaro (Reggio Emilia, 1991).
The phrase “Duetto” was coined to indicate a piece of songs for two solo voices who sing alternately or together. On this observe, combining in a rhythmical arrangement picked performs on paper and collages manufactured by Chiari from the late 70s to the early 90s with smooth “canvasses” and greater than lifestyle sculptures from Massaro’s latest Dizionario Vol.1 (Artwork Paper Editions, 2023). The exhibit expands on the innate performative qualities of language and disputes arbitrary binaries like make any difference and illustration, looking at and viewing, literalism and metaphor.
Worries on the contamination of image and language and the use of methods of manipulation to disjoint articles from context are the fil rouge in the course of the display screen as the two artists undertake a official and semiotic investigation into the visual influence of the composed text.
Composer, musician, conceptual artist, and all-round interpreter of the universality of art, Giuseppe Chiari observed in the interaction among art, tunes, gesture, and language the critical to unlock a spontaneous, unaffected encounter. An ode to improvisation and to the unrestrained liberty of expression and creation, every act, indication, or seem really should be truly worth the position of artwork inasmuch as it types element of what daily life as a total is made of. This rejection of any variety of musical, cultural, and creative hierarchy set the conceptual framework of Chiari’s oeuvre spanning experimental musical compositions along with scores and words/phrases which characterised his late output.
Usually mining the intersection of artwork and language—intended as any established of signs and symbols—he arrived to visualize that scribbles and graphic notes which dotted his musical scores would step by step acquire the visible proof of shots bearing a importance of their own. Dismissing the idea of their bare purpose, the musical scores have been manipulated, worked upon, coloured, scratched so transformed into visual compositions. Their scope subverted, they are to be appeared at and knowledgeable as a substitute of performed and listened. The inclusion of words paved the way to his later on performs in which phrases and fragments of conversation suggested an open dialogue with the public. Tiptoeing on the slender divide involving irony and non-sense, incoherence, and ambiguity, these provocatively didascalic is effective offer you a compelling testomony to Chiari’s poetics as he distilled clues to an imaginary rebus eluding the conceptual dogma.
Language as a paradoxical and conflicting drive shaping the hybridized existing is at the main of Milan-dependent Luca Massaro’s eclectic function. Through photos, sculptures, paintings, and artist publications he digs the city and on the internet transient panorama laying bare the merged action of modern day society, visual artwork, graphic conversation, and advertising in negotiating the cultural, social and political worth of the illustrations or photos that embody our collective worldview. Although the likelihood to experiment with a vast spectrum of media and supports is functional for Massaro to handle the tension in between that means and materiality, it is the innovative procedure by itself that outweighs any formal option. From his archival assortment of practically 1000 images of indicators which he shot and rigorously recorded around the past 10 years, the precise writings are extrapolated from the images employing default graphic softwares (“text-to-path”) and transformed into a textual define, developing an abstract graphic out of language. The dissociation is each digital and semantic as the “text” will get printed, painted, or solid into a sculptural piece and reproduces alone in a new graphic.
Amongst the picked works on exhibit in Duetto, two sets of paintings on steel plates emphasize the grey region wherever information and repetition overlap as they take a look at the interface involving how facts appears and how viewers interact with it. Hand-painted in white versus a black qualifications, mimicking the detrimental-constructive photographic process, words and phrases and symbols stand out all the more starkly, positioned as they are in the middle of pictorial space. The size of the four larger sized paintings is a 1:1 scale primarily based on the artist’s peak, whilst each of the twenty smaller plates is a 1:1 scale dependent on the artist’s head, this correspondence introducing a “Modulor” (scale of proportions based on human measurements) and an autobiographic characterization to the serial display. Two soft blown up sculptures of a problem mark stretched on the flooring and an exclamation mark hanging off the wall like a punchball, also extracted from the photographic matrices of Dizionario Vol.1, stand nevertheless in a point out of charged latent vitality alluding to the intrinsic oscillation of Massaro’s function amid masculine and female, tough and gentle, head and make any difference, frivolous and purposeful, large and very low, photographs and phrases. With fascinating lightboxes La notte and &, fabricated out of image-textual outlines, Massaro relays his longstanding fascination for the ubiquitous proliferation of backlit products and the charming usefulness of their communication. These “corpi tipografici” (typographic bodies of do the job) eschew definitions (λόγος) as they allow themselves be stated, browse and witnessed only through their phonetical effect (φωνή).
Via the lens of Giuseppe Chiari and Luca Massaro, now and handful of many years in the past alike, “Duetto” reflects on coexisting proportions of common eyesight and person cosmos as it maps out our dual mother nature of actors and spectators.
at Viasaterna, Milan
until eventually March 24, 2023