Gavoi, Former Barracks
As part of the Prelude of the “Island of Stories” Literary Festival
Opening Saturday 10 June 2017, h. 17.30
Until July 2, 2017
On the occasion of the 14th edition of the “Island of Stories Literary Festival” in Gavoi, the MAN Museum is pleased to present Luca Bertolo’s exhibition, If not here where.
After the projects of Alessandro Pessoli, Jennifer West and Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, Luca Bertolo’s is the fourth appointment in an annual cycle of personal exhibitions aimed at reflecting on the multiple uses and possible relevance of painting, a medium that has always been debated, to constant questioning and radical transformations, which in recent years has regained significant spaces of investigation and visibility within the international art system.
Luca Bertolo’s works implement a careful reflection on the ways of representation. His research moves from an elaborate speculative approach, revealing at the same time an attention to pictorial materials and a specific interest in the dimension and languages of the figurative. The meeting of two apparently distant worlds which, in the vision pursued by the artist, find recurring points of contact.
The fulcrum of Gavoi’s exhibition are the three paintings that occupy the center of the first three rooms of the exhibition itinerary, supported by traditional painting easels. Created between 2014 and 2016, these paintings break the symbolic mechanism of classical representation, depicting on the front what is usually found on the back, namely the frame, the flap of the canvas fixed to the wood of the painting. Mindful of a precise pictorial tradition that has its roots in the Italian Renaissance, in the genre of trompe-l’oeil and in the seventeenth-century Flemish painting of authors such as Gijsbrechts – the first to represent the verse of a painting – and naturally in the theoretical speculation of the avant-gardes historical, Bertolo’s works question the status of the painting as an object and figurative device, and the multiple and at the same time limited functions of painting, in a suspended space-time dimension.
The path finds development in the three Signs (which in English has the double meaning of sign and sign) presented in the fourth and final room of the exhibition, a series of works in which the linguistic codes of painting overlap with the communicative mechanisms of public space and specifically of signage. A simple stick can transform the canvas into a new visual code, a “signal” whose definition would require immediacy and clarity, while what in this case is offered to vision, a painted surface, rather stimulates arbitration and contemplation. Reflecting on the difference between coding and decoding, between criteria of representation and communication, the artist reveals how stimulating middle paths full of expressive strength can be identified between the immediacy of the sign and the patient pictorial composition.
The work completes the exhibition Existentialist prayer (2011), a simple sound that reproduces some songs taken from the famous documentary High School by Frederick Wiseman (USA, 1968), in which the rhythm and alternation of voices between speaker and assembly, typical of prayer in the Catholic tradition, are used in the context of a school lesson, thus overturning the codes of communication, in a dimension suspended between sacred and profane.
Luca Bertolo (Milan, 1968) graduated in Information Sciences from the State University of Milan and graduated in painting from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. He lived in Sao Paulo, London, Berlin and Vienna. Since 2006 he has lived in a town in the Apuan Alps. He has participated in exhibitions in public and private spaces, including GAM, Turin; GNAM, Rome; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Luigi Pecci Center, Prato; MACRO, Rome; Municipal Gallery of Monfalcone; Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena; Nomas Foundation, Rome; SpazioA, Pistoia; Arcade, London; Prada Foundation, Milan; 176 / Zabludowicz Collection, London; uqbar, Berlin; Galerie Tatjana Pieters, Ghent; The Goma, Madrid; Marc Foxx, Los Angeles. His articles have appeared in Flash Art, Il Giornale dell’arte, Exibart, Artribune, Warburghiana, Doppiozero. He currently teaches painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna.
Gavoi – Former Barracks
via S. Antioco 1
Timetables:
June 11-28
10:00-13:00 / 16:00-19:00
June 29th – July 2nd
10:00 -22:00