The MAN continues its investigation into the languages ​​of the 21st century by inaugurating the first of a series of Project Rooms, a new exhibition concept focused on the aesthetic universe of contemporaneity. The ground floor of the museum will be conceived as a multifaceted space, capable of changing shape with each project with the aim of acting as a spokesperson for today’s artists and their vision of the world.
The first date features the protagonist Massimo Grimaldi with the exhibition Fading in , which offers a selection of five photographic reports created between 2010 and 2021.
Grimaldi’s poetics develops in a constant tension between ethics and aesthetics. The artist has developed a working method that involves systematic collaboration with EMERGENCY, a humanitarian association created with the aim of offering free medical support to civilian victims of war and poverty. Since 2007 the artist has participated in various competitions with projects which envisaged, in case of winning, the donation of the sum to EMERGENCY and the creation of reportages in places where the NGO is active. The most striking case dates back to 2009, when Grimaldi won the international MAXXI 2per100 competition with a project which established to donate 92% of the prize of 700,000 euros to EMERGENCY for the construction of the Pediatric Center of Port Sudan and to document the activity of hospital, from its construction to full operation. An approach that demonstrates how Grimaldi reflects on society and intervenes on it, re-discussing the role of the artist.
In Uganda is the main work presented at MAN. The video projection is the result of a reportage, created at the beginning of 2021, which moves on a double level: on the one hand it describes life inside the Children’s Surgical Hospital in the Ugandan city of Entebbe, focusing the lens on the EMERGENCY staff and the patients; on the other, it shows the human and landscape beauty of Entebbe, the peninsula that stretches along the northern coast of Lake Victoria, on which the hospital stands. As the images fade away, we realize that talking about reportage is rather simplistic. In Grimaldi’s works the documentary aspect remains in the background compared to the affective component, which is dominant. In this way, his works trace a red thread between two worlds: at one end there is the museum where the works are enjoyed, while at the other end there is a reality that may appear distant to many, but not for this is less true.
Images of projects carried out in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, in the Central African Republic, follow one another in the exhibition on the screens of the latest generation iPad Pro with a fade (precisely a “fade in”), from which the title of the exhibition derives. As the critic Luca Cerizza points out, “the melancholy that relentlessly pervades Grimaldi’s work arises from that dichotomy that the artist shows as never reconciled, between the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of art and, even more specifically in his case, of a sensual attraction towards a world of perfect, hyper-defined, mostly abstract forms and images, and the awareness that every work of art risks being crushed by a process of obsolescence by which it is overcome – like any other product – from a subsequent linguistic proposal, from a new style, from the satisfaction, in short, of a new desire”.
The systematic use of the latest Apple models on which a looping sequence runs is a consolidated practice of Grimaldi’s poetics. In this way, since the (self-imposed) possibility of deciding the external appearance of the works is no longer possible, it is the artist himself who questions his own status, aligning himself with technological evolution and its contradictions. Thus, the assumption of art for eternity collapses. The result is a work with an ineluctable destiny, works that become obsolete in the space of a few years, subservient to a race for increasingly pressing technical progress.
Fading in it is the occasion for the release of a new edition of The MAN notebooks , with a critical insight by Luca Cerizza who traces the evolution of Massimo Grimaldi’s work from the beginning of his research to today.
Biography
Massimo Grimaldi (Taranto, 1974) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Milan. His practice investigates the nature of what we conventionally call “art”, the way in which it is perceived, evaluated and understood. His research is a continuous interrogation on the criteria of the production and circulation of images, on the power and limits of aesthetic speculation, on the possibility of its ethical redefinition. The artist has had solo exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2009); Villa Croce Museum, Genoa (2012); Team Gallery, New York (2011/2013); West, The Hague (2014); ZERO…, Milan (2006/2010/2013/2017/2019/2022). His works have also been presented in numerous group exhibitions, including Italics at Palazzo Grassi, Venice e MCA , Chicago (2008-2009) and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). In 2009 Grimaldi won the international MAXXI 2per100 competition, using the prize for the construction of the EMERGENCY Pediatric Center in Port Sudan.
