“Duetto” is a cross-generational exhibition that includes the novel work of Giuseppe Chiari (Firenze, 1926-2007) and the multi-disciplinary apply of Luca Massaro (Reggio Emilia, 1991).

The time period “Duetto” was coined to point a bit of music for 2 solo voices who sing alternately or collectively. On this observe, combining in a rhythmical association chosen works on paper and collages made by Chiari from the late 70s to the early 90s with modern “canvasses” and bigger than life sculptures from Massaro’s latest Dizionario Vol.1 (Artwork Paper Editions, 2023). The present expands on the innate performative properties of language and disputes arbitrary binaries like matter and illustration, studying and seeing, literalism and metaphor.

Issues on the contamination of picture and language and the usage of strategies of manipulation to disjoint content material from context are the fil rouge all through the show as each artists undertake a proper and semiotic investigation into the visible influence of the written textual content.

Composer, musician, conceptual artist, and all-round interpreter of the universality of artwork, Giuseppe Chiari noticed within the interplay between artwork, music, gesture, and language the important thing to unlock a spontaneous, unaffected expertise. An ode to improvisation and to the unrestrained freedom of expression and creation, every act, signal, or sound needs to be well worth the standing of artwork inasmuch because it kinds a part of what life as a complete is made from. This rejection of any type of musical, cultural, and creative hierarchy set the conceptual framework of Chiari’s oeuvre spanning experimental musical compositions alongside scores and phrases/phrases which characterised his late manufacturing.

Sometimes mining the intersection of artwork and language—meant as any set of indicators and symbols—he got here to examine that scribbles and graphic notes which dotted his musical scores would regularly acquire the visible proof of images bearing a significance of their very own. Dismissing the concept of their naked operate, the musical scores had been manipulated, labored upon, colored, scratched thus reworked into visible compositions. Their scope subverted, they’re to be checked out and skilled as an alternative of performed and listened. The inclusion of phrases paved the best way to his later works the place phrases and fragments of dialog urged an open dialogue with the general public. Tiptoeing on the skinny divide between irony and non-sense, incoherence, and ambiguity, these provocatively didascalic works supply 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 pressure shaping the hybridized current is on the core of Milan-based Luca Massaro’s eclectic work. By images, sculptures, work, and artist books he digs the city and on-line transient panorama laying naked the mixed motion of up to date tradition, visible artwork, graphic communication, and promoting in negotiating the cultural, social and political worth of the pictures that embody our collective worldview. Though the chance to experiment with an unlimited spectrum of media and helps is purposeful for Massaro to deal with the stress between which means and materiality, it’s the artistic course of itself that outweighs any formal resolution. From his archival assortment of virtually 1000 images of indicators which he shot and rigorously recorded during the last ten years, the precise writings are extrapolated from the photographs utilizing default graphic softwares (“text-to-path”) and transformed right into a textual define, creating an summary picture out of language. The dissociation is each digital and semantic because the “textual content” will get printed, painted, or solid right into a sculptural piece and reproduces itself in a brand new picture.

Among the many chosen works on show in Duetto, two units of work on steel plates emphasize the gray space the place message and repetition overlap as they discover the interface between how info seems and the way viewers work together with it. Hand-painted in white in opposition to a black background, mimicking the negative-positive photographic course of, phrases and symbols stand out all of the extra starkly, positioned as they’re in the course of pictorial area. The dimensions of the 4 bigger work is a 1:1 scale based mostly on the artist’s top, whereas every of the twenty smaller plates is a 1:1 scale based mostly on the artist’s head, this correspondence introducing a “Modulor” (scale of proportions based mostly on human measurements) and an autobiographic characterization to the serial show. Two gentle blown up sculptures of a query mark stretched on the ground and an exclamation mark hanging off the wall like a punchball, additionally extracted from the photographic matrices of Dizionario Vol.1, stand nonetheless in a state of charged latent power alluding to the intrinsic oscillation of Massaro’s work amid masculine and female, arduous and gentle, thoughts and matter, frivolous and purposeful, excessive and low, photos and phrases. With charming lightboxes La notte and &, fabricated out of photo-textual outlines, Massaro relays his longstanding fascination for the ever present proliferation of backlit gadgets and the charming effectiveness of their communication. These “corpi tipografici” (typographic our bodies of labor) eschew definitions (λόγος) as they let themselves be mentioned, learn and seen solely by means of their phonetical impact (φωνή).

By the lens of Giuseppe Chiari and Luca Massaro, immediately and few many years in the past alike, “Duetto” displays on coexisting dimensions of common imaginative and prescient and particular person cosmos because it maps out our twin nature of actors and spectators.

at Viasaterna, Milan
till March 24, 2023



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