Stage Evidence: Just Doors
Claudia Albertini
Open doors, half-open doors, leaning doors, non-rigid doors. "The door," as Bachelard informed us in his famous work The Poetics of Space, "is the cosmos of the half-open." Behind a half-closed, or half-open door there is always an unfolding destiny, something special and unexpected. A door visibly manifests the origin of something, just like opening and closing a book, while it also sheds light on relations of time and space. When we pass through a door, we do not simply traverse space, but we take ourselves into a different temporal dimension too. In this perspective, talking and thinking about doors involves something that goes beyond the thorough physical object, because it concerns man’s inner being and his relationship with time and space, and with the innumerable contradictions among which the categories of internal-external, public-private, life-death, full-empty dissolve.
A door is a border between the communal and the personal, just like the city that reflects in its frontiers the logic of openness and closure, of communication and separation. 2006 is the year of Italy in China, the year in which Beijing opens its doors to invite Italian fluxes to enhance cultural exchange. At the end of April, the city of Beijing, through the doors of Galleria Continua, will welcome the advent of an Italian "space-director," Loris Cecchini, whose creations seem to traverse that borderline to create a unique narrative on the concept of truth and virtuality.
Born in the Sixties, Loris Cecchini is one of the most nationally and internationally appreciated Italian young artists emerged in this last decade. Recognized for his ability in playing with different materials, he combines architectural forms, people, heterogeneous objects taken from various context and mingle them in likely scenes so as to express his perception and criticism of reality, whether it is through photographs, light boxes or rubber sculptures. In the coming exhibition, "Empty walls — just doors," to be shown at Continua on April 29th through June, Cecchini will act as a director and skilfully set up a paradoxical though true scenario. What he sees as the contemporary urban landscape is thus inscribed in a metaphysical discourse that want the creation of a space whose interior inhabit a "dedalo" of other spaces.
After the rooms and the gardens, after the palaces and the fortresses, now the city seems to have undergone a transformation, which sees its edges as portrayed in a mega labyrinth. And it’s through a labyrinth of doors and corridors that the artist wants to communicate his analysis of the surroundings. However, Loris’s doors have somewhat of real and at the same time parodic, as they were submitted to their own forces and victims of their own existence. Made of mixed iron and urethanic rubber, the whole installation is composed of seven grey casts of doors without any inner frameworks and arranged in six empty rooms. Every door, unable to bear its weight because of the ductile and flexible material, bends down and relaxes in its own structure opening on the emptiness, on the white coloured space interrupted just by the fading greyish.
As planned by the artist, a feeling of dispersion pervade those who are invited to cross the labyrinth, which seems to create a long awaiting suspended on the emptiness of the rooms. Walking through the doors is like walking through time. Doors seem to lose their architectural function to become enigmatic presences, images of real life. The artist now is the director of a hallucinating drama. Overlapping different images, he amalgamates various elements to metaphor a parallel existence. Nevertheless, the dimension of the installation brings about an emblematic condition, something presaging the tragic, in which reality shades away and the present becomes eternally hung up between the real and the virtual. In this hesitative state, Cecchini dematerialises what he sees to project it back inside, possibly to force the individual’s capacity to look at and read the elements reality is constructed by.
The artistic and narrative perspectives Cecchini offers are maybe summarized in what Birot expressed in few lines of his Les Amusements Naturales:
"At the door of the house who will come knocking?
An open door, we enter
A closed door, a den
The world pulse beats
Beyond my door
and they seem to perfectly perform in this year of Italy in China.
