Super Softly Slipping
Emilio Corti
Massimo Grimaldi, "Coccloba Club Valtur Image Forced to Be Dependent," 2002, lambda print, 60x100cm. Courtesy Zero… Milan
A word that I always remember from the Middle Ages Art History books that I studied at school is re-use. So it came that new architecture resembled the old, with pieces of Roman basilicas, columns, capitals found, stolen, unearthed and changed. Our art making today continues to strive for youth and beauty. Yet, we see in the work and words of many artists how re-using, unearthing, looking at things from a new point of view, looking for new relations that emerge in history, are approaches that open a new wide range of possibilities:
Christian Frosi is on show at Isabella Bortolozzi gallery, Berlin, in the group show� ?We disagree? at Andrew Kreps gallery, New York and at the ?Furla Prize? exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. In his work, the traditional habit of attributing meaning to an artwork, giving it a defined form, is replaced by a series of shifts that produce a peculiar loss of the center and explore the fascination of drift. ?Foam? was installed at Zero Gallery, Milan, in 2004: a machine producing foam was displayed on the gallery?s terrace producing a continuously changing cloudy shape that finally trespassed the border and fell into the street. The borders between sculpture and performance were gone; the event was and was not shaped at the same time. The skill to work and live in ever-changing conditions is peculiar of our times.
The series consists of sets of sort of handmade brackets, displayed geometrically on the wall and changing in color, material, shape from one edition to the next. T5 and T6 are the latest variations, almost invisible, on a same model. Looking at the entire series the feeling is of a very light vibration or a change in color soon vanished. Like the sequence of works in the career of an artist. Like running through a catalogue of Mondrian’s work. The linear developing and the evolution of a form that tends to rebuild itself with the fascination and the emotional memory of the preceding work.
Massimo Grimaldi will show in "Double" at Zero gallery, Milan, next April, in "No Manifesto" at GAMEC, Bergamo, next May, at the Fondazione Halevim, Milano, next June and at Isabella Bortolozzi gallery, Berlin, next September. He dismantles the habitual ways of relating to art. Each time he sets a situation in which we are unable to give things the value we are used to, and we feel the inconsistency of these values. Instead, new relations are found, new possibilities of relating to things, in a sort of quiet after the storm. "Human organisation forms are conventional and express themselves in a conventional form. Things we attach importance to are only things we have attached importance to. Every type always leans to its stereotype. The lack of great qualitative differences corresponds to the lack of qualitative differences. Art reduces itself to its fact, and its sense is in this reduction. There are no conditions to achieve, but to realize with their simple presence. A work of art is overcome by the presentation of its structure and by the debate on that structure. More than the apology of its own success, it contains the genealogy of its obsoleteness. Every new idea of art as idea will only be an idea and, being new, it will only be new. Novelties consist in their conventional content. They perpetuate works of art as still judgeable masses. The works’ intelligence consists in the perception of their intelligence, therefore in perception alone. Their differences only support their difference. A work is an intermediate level that divides the artist from his public. Being an intermediate level, and a new metaphor for this distance, it fulfils its function. My works are not roaring tigers, but rather the quicksand that swallowed them down."
A couple of miles north, Simona Denicolai and Ivo Provoost show at SMAK in Gent from 5 February to 20 March. Shift, preexistence, change of relations with the environment are some of the concepts that lead their work with strength, humor and philosophy, each time setting an unpredictable situation, a change of roles and a transformation of sites.
"In the past, we were an earthworm digesting some future in a Chinese restaurant with Serbian shoes in the present. At the end of the nineties we started doing play mobiles in France. A play mobile doesn’t allow you to create new shapes, but to invent a scenario by shifting preexisting shapes. We used huge industrial parts of aircrafts, shipyards, not finished and rough, and architecture or urban situations, but also packaging. There’s something cool about the earthworm, and more specific its relation with its context. The earthworm swallows its context, digest it and defecates it in order to survive and move in its environment. This environment becomes public space when there is the presence of someone else, a witness. Only one other person is enough. So even the matrimonial bedroom is a public space, like opening hours of a museum for example too. The classical public space is so conditioned nowadays and politically correct that museums should take this chance to become the new underground spaces of the world."
