Venice: Pre-Biennale - MUST SEEs -
Le Stanze del Vetro - Fragile? exhibition. The Fragile?
exhibition, until July 28, curated by Mario Codognato, at the new
glass museum Le Stanze del Vetro on the magical island of San Giorgio Maggiore
just across from San Marco features 28 works of art by internationally
renowned artists. In the context of
Venetian glassmaking and its peculiar craft
connotations, Fragile? aims at taking a different yet equally
important aspect into account, namely the use of glass as a found object, with
specific metaphorical and linguistic features.
Above: Giuseppe Penone – Barra d’aria, 1969-1996. The work Barra d’aria is a glass
parallelepiped through which the artist stimulates a perception different than
that of the noises of the city. The air
it contains becomes the constructive material of the work, to which one thus
attributes, as would latter also be the case for the celebrated work Soffio, (1978),
sculptural value and an automatic process.
Mona Hatoum – Drowning Sorrow (wine
bottles) 2004, detail. Drowning Sorrow is an installation comprised of two hundred wine
bottles that seem to be set in cement, in an elegant circular arrangement. The glass bottles, the transparency of which
creates the plays of light and shadow often present in her work, if on the one
hand clearly refer to the bitter habit of drowning one’s sorrow in alcohol, on
the other hand, caught in a flow that has crystallized their position, can be
read as a metaphor for a shipwreck or romantic drift since they are potential
ferrymen of anonymous messages.
Gilbert and George - Reclining Drunk, 1973.
The work Reclining Drunk directly calls to mind the widespread problem
of alcoholism in London, previously addressed in other works. Pursuing the
credo of the total superimposition of art and life, the banal gin bottle
crumpled by heat, or better, by suffering, rises to a work of art and becomes a
metaphor for the existential suffering of humanity.
Ai Weiwei – Dust to Dust, 2009. Dust
to Dust is a simple glass jar, like one you could buy at Ikea, a symbol of the
conformity of modern industry, it contains within it the pulverized remains of
an ancient ceramic vase from the Neolithic period, destroyed by the artist
himself, who with this irreverent act transformed an ancient urn into a modern
one. Condensing the memory of history
into a handful of dust, translating the container into the contained.
Le Stanze del Vetro - Fragile? exhibition. Instead of the precise traits of manufactured
artworks, other aspects are sought, such as symbolic transparency, fragility
and resistance, imprecision and smoothness, along with the construction of
elements that draw inspiration from reality and contemporary artistic language. “In the 21st century, because of the
historical avant-garde movements, visual arts cease to be a sole mimesis of
reality through painting and sculpture, states curator Mario Codognato
(above), by using objects and materials taken from the real world and
industrial production, a new metaphoric, yet tautologically concrete, dimension
is born. Glass, thanks to its widespread use in architecture and its double
nature of transparent medium and at the same time barrier, becomes a new
linguistic tool through which to create images”.
Artist and the exhibitions’ art director Laura de
Santillana and chairman of Pentagram Stiftung Marie-Rose Kahane.
Joseph Beuys – Terremoto in Palazzo, 1981, detail.
Terremoto in Palazzo is a disturbing installation, loaded with memory and
collective pain, made by the artist right after the 1980 earthquake in Irpinia
on invitation by the Neapolitan gallerist Lucio Amelio, who dedicated an
important contemporary art exhibition to the tragic event. The symbolic power of exploded glass in the
center of the installation reflects the fragility and transitoriness of
existence and contrasts with the precariousness of the still-intact jars that
support the furniture, a metaphor for a civilization in delicate balance.
On the scientific committee David Landau.
Fondazione Giorgio Cini Onlus, general secretary
Pasquale Gagliardi.
Marcel Duchamp – Air de Paris, 1919-1939. Duchamp’s sarcastic irreverent practice is
also present in the work Air de Paris, a classic pharmacy cruet that the artist
paradoxically claimed to be full of air from the French capital. The transparency of the glass container
underlies the inconsistency of the assumption, that it is the presence of air,
which is obviously invisible and above all the immateriality of the work
itself, the value of which resides fundamentally in the artist’s assertion.
Damien Hirst – Death or Glory, 2001.
Death or Glory is a title which carries within the ambivalence of the
artist’s work in the precise desire to give rise in the public to a double
reaction of attraction/repulsion, to attempt a representation of human
transitoriness and at the same time to proclaim the victory of science over
flash. The fascination of Hirst’s work
lies in the contradiction of the message even before the provocation of the
language, in the capacity to formalize the anxiety of contemporary humankind
through tangible visions.
Cyril de Commarque (above) – Migrants, 2013. In the installation Migrants,
bottles are on the one hand a metaphor for the forced voyage in the desperation
for survival of the African populations constrained to travel the waters of the
Mediterranean to cross invisible boundaries of Europe in a makeshift way and,
on the other hand, the symbol of a limbo, a condition at once both uncertain
and hopeful. In a composition organic in
tone and emulating the vascular system, glass bottles contain throbbing forms
similar to a heart or lungs that fill the room with the sound of voices, anonymous
and confused messages that create a sensation of disorientation, a state of
precariousness, of tension and finally of personal involvement in this
collective drama.
