STATUE
12 apr 2019 – 15 jun 2019
A turbulent, helter-skelter situation in a complex environment, Statue brings together a clusterfuck of familiar microcosms, presented in an unfamiliar way. The accumulated entities become a kin to a disaster on the logos—a productive interplay between fabrics, textures, nudes, plasters and mirrors. Human, all too human, the objects underlay and draw metaphors from the fascinating moment we live in, where contemporary culture becomes a matter of decentralized, neural networks, codified into realms of controlled chaos. Statue in turn expands our sense of façade and surface as textures of a hyper-complex world, culminating in troves of data and conceptual signifiers that form into hierarchical systems in disarray. Décolletéing into the depths of sculpture unbound to transgressive forms or ideas, the assemblage of works offer a disquieting parade of objects for your contemplation, from the mundane to the moody, from the sublime to the dreamy, presenting as it were an exhibition that enters into the subconscious of human desire, untethered from, yet insistent on the ambiguity of statue as a form of departure, rather than one of arrival.
Santo Tolone’s captivating works are made by taking logos from the back of jean pockets and reformulating them to make new compositions. He then embroiders them onto denim, generating a distorted reality where the logos seem to take on an independent life. The works inhabit a kind of absurdist space, capturing the contemporaneity of logos as the icons of our day, embedding them within a form of contemporary remix culture, which poses questions a kin to thinking about entropy with relation to originality.
By combining plaster and rollerblade wheels, Gabriele De Santis’s sculptures create unknown yet uncannily familiar objects. The aggregate sculptures foreground a notion of history in perpetual flux, an evolutionary impulse of things that tilt but don’t quite move, creating a dynamic quality that mimics a never ending sense of anticipation and angst. Using sculptural quotes that range from the history of Kinetic Art through to found-objects and Dada ready-mades, Gabriele De Santis’s unique oeuvre will be well known to art historians and curators, albeit here we find a humorous and unique interpretation of objects fixated to Western popular culture.
In Louise Giovenelli’s paintings we see images that refer to Elizabeth Taylor in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1963 epic film Cleopatra, part of her ‘Marker’ series that also revisits motifs generated through the female subjects of Fra Angelico and Piero Della Francesca. The pictures on view at Frutta Gallery reveal a scar down the face of Taylor, an image made post Taylor’s neck surgery, a time when she was the personification of beauty in an era obsessed with iconic heroines. Andy Warhol famously concentrated on her image repeatedly, and Taylor was—at that point—equally as iconic as Marilyn Monroe. Louise Giovenelli’s work thereby asks us to consider the timelessness of beauty as epitomized in Taylor’s face, the subject of a classical, by-gone era, yet contemporary as well.
These accrued concepts give way to an assemblage of emotions and temporalities that link the works in the exhibition. Striking a balance both within and between them, Statue inhabits the space of juxtaposition of subjects and objects, the artists in turn playing with the conventional and the obscure, the peculiar and the commonplace. Working with an expanded understanding of media, Louise Giovenelli, Gabriele De Santis and Santo Tolone find ways to present uncertainty as a conceptual habitus of contemporary life, in-situ to the proverbial condition of global chaos and social disarray.
FRUTTA
Via dei Salumi, 53
Rome