Corinna Gosmaro | CHUTZPAH!
3 oct 2020 – 23 dec 2020
Second solo show by Corinna Gosmaro hosted in the gallery spaces. The artist, who is currently in residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, from next January will be a residential guest at the American Academy in Rome as the recipient of the Italian Fellowship in Visual Arts.
The exhibition is in continuity with the creative journey embarked on by Corinna Gosmaro since the beginning, when her pictorial works on industrial filters intended to generate landscapes as an attempt to blend perception, cognition, memory and emotional resonances.
To Corinna Gosmaro, time and places are elements free from any chronological or geographical linearity. They are indeed pieces of knowledge that can be exploited to investigate archetypes: images, shapes or objects representative of the fundamental creative moments in the history of humanity. The search for the archetype is not aimed only at the creation of the work of art, but rather, the latter is the final result of a transversal process for the identification of a possible behavioural matrix.
A method of thinking and working that draws inspiration from neuroscience that explores the correlation between memory and imagination in terms of chronesthesia or mental time travelling – that is the capacity to mentally reconstruct past personal experience as well as to imagine possible scenarios in the future.
Corinna Gosmaro is interested in combining in an organic way the inputs from the mnemonic processes with the suggestions unleashed by imagination, thus emphasizing a state of mind, even more than a conceptual path, and triggering a sort of psychophysical condition that the artist defines by the word CHUTZPAH. Although the original etymology of this Yiddish word meant “impudence” or “insolence”, over the years it has taken on a broader semantic value, referring to “the quality of audacity, for good or for bad”, such as courage, ardour, mettle.
In conceiving the exhibition, Corinna Gosmaro has associated the concept of CHUTZPAH to the Baudelairean idea of spontaneity as the rapidly intuitive outcome of knowledge and intelligence. Baudelaire’s thinking shows a strong affinity with the modern debates as it envisages the union of the associative power of the imagination with the capacity of devising something new based on the mass of materials accumulated and stored by memory. Artists are mental time travellers; they add value to imagination and to the possible through the true and the real.
The works on display seek to embody the exaltation of the creative act and the intrinsically impertinent power of each work. The staircase becomes a metaphor for ascension and descension of the thought, but its shape emphasizes the non-linearity of the movements of the human soul. The handrails are reminiscences of the mental scaffoldings that move on different and transversal temporal planes; a deviation between past, present and future, oblivious of the temporal dimension as well as of a linear direction. The drawings and the zoomorphic rope sculptures introduce an animalistic dimension that evokes the foundations of an evolutionary vision from a global perspective, not only of the cultural history of the human species.
THE GALLERY APART
Via Francesco Negri, 43
Rome