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Pietro Roccasalva
Il
Traviatore, 2011
soft
pastel on paper on forex
30.71 x
27.56 inches (78 x 70 cm)
framed:
32.87 x 29.72 inches (83.5 x 75.5 cm)
Courtesy
of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
PIETRO
ROCCASALVA
The Strange Young
Neighbours
February
11 – March 24, 2012
Opening
reception: Saturday, February 11, 2012,
6:00–9:00pm
Live
performance: Saturday, February 11,
11:00am––9:00pm
David Kordansky Gallery is very
pleased to announce The Strange Young Neighbours, a
solo exhibition by Pietro Roccasalva. The
show is Roccasalva's first with the gallery, as well as his
first solo gallery exhibition in the United States. It will
include paintings, drawings, a neon work, and a large-scale
sculptural installation that will serve as the site for a
tableau vivant performance. The performance will take
place on Saturday, February 11th, beginning at 11:00am and
continuing until the end of the opening reception at
9:00pm.
Roccasalva explores the potential for art objects
to become active agents of simulacrum, sites where the animate
and inanimate worlds undergo profound crossing. Painting
serves as the orbital center for a practice that includes
sculpture, performance, and video, and that has increasingly
come to represent a self-contained universe of poetic
narratives and philosophical inquiries. Roccasalva has
referred to his paintings as 'microchips', devices that
organize an ever-expanding network of processes and allusions.
Synthesizing compositional strategies drawn from religious
iconography, modernist collage, and digital distortion, and
skillfully rendered over months and even years, the figures in
the paintings are both deeply familiar and impossibly strange.
They freeze the gaze and conjure the sense that though
artworks can never be fully understood, they are caught with
their viewers in an endless feedback loop of exchanged
signification.
The Strange Young Neighbours borrows its
title from a standalone tale in Goethe's 1809 novel
Elective Affinities. In the story, a
near-catastrophic drowning plays a key role in uniting a young
couple destined to be together since childhood. Though the
onset of adulthood and its misunderstood passions temporarily
drive them apart, when the girl jumps from a moving boat and
the boy saves her, they finally realize that they are in fact
meant to be married.
This
tale is just one of the texts that inform Just Married
Machine, a major sculptural installation that occupies
the center of the gallery and sets the stage for a series of
new paintings as well as the tableau vivant. A wooden
boat suggests direct connection to Goethe's narrative, but the
other objects suggest that additional processes are at play.
In fact, the scene is also based on a still/still life taken
from the short Pasolini film La Ricotta. Roccasalva
has allowed a series of visual slippages to transform objects
depicted in what is essentially a traditional nature morte
into fully realized, life-sized objects: a shallow tray
becomes the mandolin-shaped boat, an overturned basket becomes
the hot air balloon, and heads of garlic are translated, via a
humorous visual 'misunderstanding', into a sculpture that
resembles a crown of toilets. The work's most profound
slippage, however, takes place between genres as the nature
morte is repositioned within the realm of living things. For
instance, a bottle in the La Ricotta still life is
reinterpreted as a woman; accordingly, on the day of the
opening, an actual married couple will inhabit Just
Married Machine.
The
performance and sculptures trace an arc that encompasses
Pasolini, Goethe, and the concept of the 'bachelor machine.'
However, where the 'bachelor machine' maintains desire by
prolonging a state prior to consummation, Just Married
Machine completes a circuit by unifying nature morte and
living couple in a single visual experience. This process is
further borne out by Roccasalva's practice, in which tableaux
vivants often become the subjects of future drawings and
paintings. Meanwhile, an accompanying still life painting
entitled Study for Just Married Machine points to
this process by enacting its reversal. The work depicts a
goblet and a traditional Italian rosetta bread, seemingly
gendered objects that will memorialize the departed actors
when the tableau vivant is over. Here, Roccasalva continues to
elaborate upon polarities of male and female and the fusion of
animate and inanimate forms.
Surrounding Just Married Machine are a
group of paintings featuring a recurring character in
Roccaslva's work. Il Traviatore (the waiter) is
always depicted carrying a lemon juicer on an otherwise empty
tray. In the context of this exhibition, he is also the figure
that bears witness to the elaborate coupling of genres that
takes place before him. But because Roccasalva distorts,
blurs, and deconstructs his face and body, the waiter's
surreal fragmentation embodies that coupling: he is both a
witness and a thing to be witnessed. His metallic tray and lid
often become the subjects of extreme focus, tours de force of
reflection and revelation in which an elaborate architecture,
otherwise absent from the picture, can be viewed.
Given
that Roccasalva is constantly drawing on one aspect of his
practice to inform another, the reflected architecture is
perhaps best understood in relation to the lemon juicer. A
foundational image in the artist's practice, the juicer has
previously been seen as the imagined cupola of a cathedral in
drawings, videos, and digital prints. It has been described by
Roccasalva as the metonymic symbol of a potentially
unachievable work: the construction, in some distant future,
of the cathedral itself as a culminating artistic statement.
If it this cathedral that appears in the waiter's tray, then
he, like the lemon squeezer, is the bearer only of implied -
rather than tangible - presence.
By
their very nature, artworks exemplify openness of meaning. The
intimate embrace between artwork and viewer can never be fully
consummated. Nevertheless, a neon text from Lacan that marks
the entrance/exit of the exhibition suggests that object and
viewer share a common genetic source: the gaze. The words "you
never look at me from the place I see you" are arranged as a
linguistic Möbius strip; they carry the intimation that
objects, once they have been looked upon with enough
intensity, possess the haunting potential to stare back at
their viewers. Like the waiter and his reflective tray, the
viewer of The Strange Young Neighbours is implicated
as another of its uncanny projections, an object that painting
sees.
In
recent years, Pietro Roccasalva's work has been seen in major
exhibitions internationally, including Fare Mondi / Making
Worlds, 53rd International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale;
Manifesta 7, European Biennial for Contemporary Art, Trentino
- Südtirol/Alto Adige, Italy; ITALICS. ARTE ITALIANA FRA
TRADIZIONE E RIVOLUZIONE 1968-2008, Palazzo Grassi, Venice and
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Scene Shifts, Bonniers
Konsthall, Stockholm; and Tableaux, MAGASIN - Centre National
d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France, and Z, CCS Bard at
Seventh Regiment Armory, New York. Roccasalva lives and works
in Milan.
DAVID KORDANSKY
GALLERY
3143 S.
La Cienega Blvd, Unit A
Los
Angeles, CA 90016
T: 1
323-222-1482
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