Bn PROJECTS - Maison GREGOIRE

Won't you not see ? chapter C - with Alessandro Costanzo & Anna Guillot

Emmanuel — 2024-10-05T15:15:56Z

A project curated by Emmanuel Lambion, Bn PROJECTS

In the framework of Urpflanze des Mittelmeers

Guillot, who has been the initiator leading force behind this catanese free art laboratorium for 7 years, has recently opened an antenna - OTC in the garden - in Caltanissetta, at the ground floor apartment of an historical palazzo opening up onto a lush garden.

We arrived in the early afternoon : The town was, Sicilian style, at this hour of day, almost empty but for an impressive number of male subsaharian migrants, « extra-comunitari » as they are called by euphemism in Italy. The concentration for such a small town was particularly striking.

Indeed, Caltanissetta's city center displays in its architecture many testimonies of a former grandeur and prosperity which made it one of the most industrious cities in the reign of the Two-Sicilies, before Italian unification. The area of Caltanissetta was particularly known and prosperous for its sulfur-mining industry, the « zolfatare » where many poor uneducated children (the « carusi » in Sicilian) were working at the risk of their lives under the bowels of the earth.

The title of the exhibition, « Won't you not see ? » subverts the common idiomatic invitation to notice something in English, thus acting, conversely, as a metaphor for the efforts often displayed by social forces to cover up critical facts and challenging realities.

Alessandro Costanzo comes up here with « Oscuru » (i.e. dark in Sicilian language), a series of sculptural installations linking in a dialectical way the interior of the venue with its exterior, the lush and semi-wild and abandoned garden. As raw material for his sculptures, he used a mixed agglomerate stone combining limestone, marl and chalk, which he found in the abandoned « zolfatare ». The raw stones have been partially cut and severed so as to allow the obliterated or forgotten voices of Caltanissetta to emerge and be heard.

Costanzo managed to interview several former « carusi » who survived the decay of the « zolfatare », alongside migrants, whom he asked to evoke the obscure and dark moments of the long journey that brought them to Sicily and, eventually, to Caltanissetta, where most of them await their fate to be sealed (accepted or sent back to their countries of origin). These latter interviews are recorded in « broken » Italian and in their original mother tongues (wolof/ pulaar). The recordings are integrated to / emerge in a feable yet resilient way from the stone sculptures which stand out out as odd appendices to elements of this bourgeois domestic space (its dining table, the sofa, the door to the kitchen..).

The biggest « stone / speaking sculpture » is placed in the garden, as if the voice from Caltanissetta's bowels and obliterated recent past was re-emerging from the ground.

Textual printed and autograph material around agrarian sciences, botanic biology, physics chemistry and maths form therefore here the base of the installation which, as often in Anna Guillot's work, finds a further expanded aesthetic and conceptual articulation through a film projection centered on photosynthesis, giving a dual interpretation for the title of the installation putting thus nature and its autogenerative processes on a par with the fatherly figure.

The conceptual hybridization at work in anna guillot's proposal finds also a visual metaphoric resolution in the way notes, fragments, images are inserted and integrated in the projection.

Responding in its specific way to the red thread of the exhibition, the unearthing process of the rhysomatic associative intertextual approach dear to anna Guillot leads to unveil ancestral and primordial characters all too often relegated in oblivion.

Emmanuel Lambion

Opening Saturday 21 September 2024, 6 p.m.

Palazzo Mazzone-Alessi
Via Camillo Benso conte di Cavour, 29
I- 93100 Caltanissetta

Promoted by On the Contemporary —in the Garden, Koobook Archive
With the support of Comune di Caltanissetta, torronificio Geraci, Balloon project

Ghosts and Nails @ KXX -Überchannel

Emmanuel — 2024-10-05T13:52:44Z

Everything often hangs only by a thread or a nail.
This is namely the case for Ghosts and Nails, the exhibition which inaugurates Überchannel, the new programmation of Bn PROJECTS @ KXX. Overall, it is an exhibition which speaks of meta- / -infra-visibility but also of resistance and resilience. This nail or these threads are for you to find and discover, if not necessarily to use them.

To begin with, there is the discrete silver nail imagined by Patrick Carpentier. The urban legend has it that it was the only artwork hanging in the very special house of one one the most celebrated Belgian conceptual and minimal art collectors, whose collections are now on display at MOMA.

Patrick Carpentier provides also the symbolic lead of the inauguration of the programmation of this artistic belvedere dominating all Brussels, suggesting through another protocol / artwork the possible, playful and performative extension of this programme. He has been keeping / collecting over the past years locker keys from the major art museums which he visits worldwide, thus potentially appropriating semi-private / semi-public, confidential and clandestine, yet prestigious, exhibition spaces.

The protocol will be activated during the exhibition, in a given art institution in Brussels, which will thereby act as a sort of delocalized, stealthy and surprising antenna to the exhibition you'll discover at KXX - Überchannel.

Acting as sort of pictorial negatives, often oscillating between representation and abstraction, Tom Lowe's new paintings, conceived and imagined from the very central neuralgic of the residential part of K XX, that is its bed, will be revealed in an indirect mediatized way.

It is only through a reverse accessibility setting that one will discover some evanescent traces of daily objects from this domestic place.

Laurent Dupont's intervention, liminally oscillating between sculpture and camouflaged painting, acts as a sort of anti-ready made, both conceptually radical and humorously subversive.

Integrated to specific architectural and furniture elements of the space, the proposals of Zinaïda Tchelidze, Joke Robaard, Trin Alt suggest or elicit evanescent presences / activities.

Whereas Trin Alt, like Tom Lowe, reacts to the new functionality of the studio as an artist residency and organic living space, whose panoramic bed occupies a central position, Zinaïda Tchelidze infiltrates the peripheral spaces, its spectacularly scenographic windows and balconies.

Discrete ghost-like presences are also suggested by the sculptural elements which she integrates in the living room, in the guise of precious lost wax fingerprints.

Joke Robaard's Se-lections activate on garments the etymological dialectics encapsulated in their very title (id est separating from a collection) : Cutting off textiles along the seams of the clothes, she creates resilient open silhouettes.

Alessandro Costanzo's contributions infiltrate the exhibition texts, which thereby become limited and unique artist pieces. He asked A.I. to invent / create jokes, tales and prayers (70 of each, 210 in total), thereby questioning the very specificity of the paradigmatic qualities which we usually associate to humankind : Laughter, narrativity, spirituality.

Cheers, mind your joke, fable or prayer, and welcome to Brussels.

This exhibition inaugurates Überchannel, the programmation organised by Bn PROJECTS @ KXX, in an apartment sublty remodelled by architect Yannick Vergnaud.
This new venue of artistic projects and residencies is located on the 20th floor of an apartment building emblematic of the urban development of Brussels in the 2nd half of 20th century.
KXX overlooks Canal and KANAL - Centre Pompidou and offers an unsurpassed panorama on the European and Belgian capital.

Opening on Thursday 21 March 2024, 5 pm.

Quai du Batelage 5 /bell 284
B-1000 Brussels
www.bnprojects.be

Exhibition open on Saturdays, 2-6 pm
and on apointment
from 23/03/2024 until 04/05/2024

Special opening during Art Brussels on Friday 26 April 2024, 2-6 pm

A limited edition of an alternative invitation to the project as well as an individual and unique version of New Fathers by Alessandro Costanzo will be handed over to the 210 visitors of the show.

Most sincere thanks to the artists for their trust and commitment, to Yannick Vergnaud and Hannelore Thomas for their hospitality and enthusiastic support, to Marc Buchy for the layout of the cards, and to Gauli Zitter, Brussels & Galerie Mieke van Schaijk, 's-Hertogenbosch.

NEWS : Vis-à-Vis / Dos-à-Dos with Nele Tas, Renato Settembre, Rémie Vanderhaegen & Claude Panier

Emmanuel — 2024-10-04T15:37:09Z

An exhibition curated by Emmanuel Lambion, Bn PROJECTS for Atelier Claude Panier

It all started with an invitation from neighbours, that of Isabelle Parisod and Leo Panier, wife and son of the late Claude Panier, to imagine a project during the coming 2024 edition of Art on Paper in the atelier of Claude, linking his work to that of other artists.
I knew Claude's work a little, having invited him in a massive historical group show in 2003 @ Botanique while I was Head of Exhibitions there (2000-2004) : the show Abstractions was an attempt at retracing a subjective panorama of abstraction in Wallonie-Bruxelles from little known works of Joseph Lacasse (predating Kandinsky) up to the present. Claude was one of the living artists whom I had invited but besides that occasion, we did not collaborate on another project.
What I appreciated in his work was/is the obvious consistency in the treatment of certain themes declined in series, with expressive titles. His body of work is certainly an obsessive one, revolving about the dialectics of desire and body, as an open and layered battlefield, which he managed to translate into layered multimedia techniques, mainly on paper and canvas.

The first artist I imagined to confront with Claude's work was Renato Settembre, an Italian Germany-trained artist & residing in Brussels for the past 5 years, whom I had recently met. Renato had invited me to cartacea cartaccia, duo show with Margot that they had organized @ Rockin'squat, a former maison de repos in temporary occupation, 62 avenue de la Couronne.
The show was brilliantly installed and left an enduring impression on me.

Sedimentation made me think of two other artists whose bodies of works, although very different, I would have liked to confront with that of Claude :
the Gentenaar Rémie Vanderhaeghen, whose work I had discovered as a jury for the Eeckman Prize for the 2023 edition of Art and Paper and the Antwerp-based Nele Tas, who had come to my attention through social media.

At that stage, in spite of my interest in and fondness for their very distinctive practices, I was not sure whether these heterogeneous affinities could work with Claude's work and together as well.
As often the case when paradoxical and intuitive associations are coming to one's mind, things in the end fit together. Upon discussing with each of the artists, multiple threads and echoes appeared between each of their respective practice and that of Claude.

Quite naturally, the question of desire, in all its different possible manifestations, emerged as a possible main conductive red line, eliciting questions about/around our object-s of desire, or about us as desiring subject-s, or around the decisive focussing of desire in the creative process itself.
A desire that, at turns, may be repressed or inhibited, hesitant and questioning itself, or sublimated and translated.
As a sort of indirect metaphor for this translated and involutive quest for the creative desire, it is also striking that each of the artists resort to a multilayered process, often directly through a superposition of textures and supports or via an intricate to-and-fro of techniques.
Besides the subject itself of the representation, with recurrent leitmotive or obsessions, specific attention is also paid to the importance of its background or framing, whether that be on a conceptual / metaphorical or physical material way.

One of the main subjects of Nele Tas pictorial practice is her own persona, body and figure, here presented in two distinctive series, in style, techniques and moods. The Dienbladportretten are generally frontal portraits painted in vivid colours, subsequently obliterated by wide and vigorous dark / black brush strokes, which subsequently serve as mere backgrounds for the depiction of an object of desire or crystallization.
Strong and darkened pinks form the monochrome palette of the sturdy bodily silhouettes, more or less defined, in her Les fragiles series of canvases. The paradoxal implicit fragility of these figures exposing themselves, is underlined by a treatment of the edges of the canvases / frames of the compositions, enhanced with an optimist rainbow palette of watercolours, litterally untouchable and very fragile.

Renato Settembre's practice is metamorphic, building itself as an associative body of work made up of series of interconnected works which, from the one to the other, show translations and alterations of motives, techniques, scales.
What is originally born as a drawing can become a painting, before inspiring a subsequent print / lithograph, which in turn can generate a distinctive drawing or painting…
The series which we present here revolves about the sublimation of a given linguistic central motive, the word Fiancée, magnified and generated with letters that have a strong plastic valence, which infiltrates, if in altered or camouflaged fashion, most of the works on display.
Settembre freely generates his own evolutive alphabet as a painter.
Often derived from organic shapes evoking bodily elements (e.g. spermatozooi, ovocyts), his visual alphabet evolves and adapts until dissolving again into captcha-like organic forms.

All this said, at a second glance at Renato's works, what is striking is that, besides the recurrence and / or consistency of shapes, forms and « signifiers », what ultimately preoccupies and informs his research is how to deal with the negative space left over. His “backgrounds”, made of dashes, lines or brushstrokes applied along the contour of the foreground elements (like under eye wrinkles ?), act both as an abstract appendix and counterforce to his figurative vocabulary.

Remie Vanderhaegen's work is that embraces the circulation of images, ideas and concepts, their re-appropriation in a way that is often liminally positioned between iconoclasm and idolatry, at the same time very precise in the aesthetic gestures choices that are made, and evasive and ambiguous in their semantic and symbolic valence.
It blossoms in the totally assumed claim for a certain indetermination, an indetermination of desire also, leading at times to the creation of seemingly blurred images, transitive associations and very open interpretations.
The creative process is often sedimented as in Claude Panier's work, resorting to a variety of techniques and material filters, often through the additive superposition of supports and layers (epoxy, varnishes).
The ultimate factor that both triggers and wraps up the creative process is a reflection about the framing and context of the object subject, whichever the latter may be.
These elements are particularly obvious in the work that gave/lent its title to the exhibition :
Vis-à-vis / dos-à-dos, made up of precisely framed & superposed dias, it evokes, in a blurred graphic way, the typologies of carriages that were designated with the corresponding french vocables.
Of course, as such, this title evokes the dialectics of desire and affinities at work in the present show, at times in dialogue, at times just ignorant of one another.
For this show, Remie realized a series of sculptural installations adapting / reacting to the architectural space. They are made up of letterboxes swallowing in a ambiguous but sculpturally effective way some prints featuring the meticulously indesigned reproductions of distinctive watermarks from image data banks. These sculptures respond to Herms, a series of specifically framed and fixed photographs taken during a residency in South Africa.
In additiion, a series of captcha multilayered drawings, often referring (in their reading) to the very dissolution of forms and signifyers, incidentally form a contrasting counterpoint to Renato Settembre's monumental compositions.

Exhibition open on 4, 5, 6 October
2—7 pm
Atelier Claude Panier
17 rue Cornet de Grez
B-1030 Bruxelles

In partnership with Art on Paper & Brussels Drawing Week

NEWS : Won't you not see ? chapter C with Alessandro Costanzo and Anna Guillot

Emmanuel — 2024-10-04T15:30:13Z

A project curated by Emmanuel Lambion, Bn PROJECTS
In the framework of Urpflanze des Mittelmeers

Opening Saturday 21 September 2024, 6 p.m.

Palazzo Mazzone-Alessi
Via Camillo Benso conte di Cavour, 29
I- 93100 Caltanissetta

Exhibition Open by appointment until 07/12/2024
(write to onthecontemporary@gmail.com)

It all started with a late May journey to Caltanissetta. Alessandro and I had been invited to develop a contribution in the framework of the recently opened exhibition project in the Catania's venue of On the Contemporary - Palazzo Manganelli - Urpflanze des Mittelmeers - curated by the artist Anna Guillot.
Guillot, who has been the initiator leading force behind this catanese free art laboratorium for 7 years, has recently opened an antenna - OTC in the garden - in caltanissetta, at the ground floor apartment of an historical palazzo opening up onto a lush garden.

On the way, the contemplation of the harsh yet magnificent Sicilian landscapes elicited in us the reminiscence of Dino Buzzati's « Deserto dei Tartari ». A feeling of « limes », and frontier, whilst paradoxically approaching the very center of Sicily.
We arrived in the early afternoon : The town was, Sicilian style, at this hour of day, almost empty but for an impressive number of male subsaharian migrants, « extra-comunitari » as they are called by euphemism in Italy. The concentration for such a small town was particularly striking.

A direct explanation for this observation lies in the fact that Caltanissetta houses in its immediate vicinity - at Pian del Lago - one of the main asylum centers in Sicily, The center, combining the three typologies of the genre, is strategically placed in a former powder factory, a witness of the former and now decayed industrial glory of this once prosperous mining city.
Indeed, Caltanissetta's city center displays in its architecture many testimonies of a former grandeur and prosperity which made it one of the most industrious cities in the reign of the Two-Sicilies, before Italian unification. The area of Caltanissetta was particularly known and prosperous for its sulfur-mining industry, the « zolfatare » where many poor uneducated children (the « carusi » in Sicilian) were working at the risk of their lives under the bowels of the earth.

It naturally came to us that the show would and should revolve about this idea of non visibility, of meta- infra-visibility or, rather, of invisibilization of these two prominent, yet partially covered up aspects of the past and of contemporary socio-economic history of Caltanissetta.
The title of the exhibition, « Won't you not see ? » subverts the common idiomatic invitation to notice something in English, thus acting, conversely, as a metaphor for the efforts often displayed by social forces to cover up critical facts and challenging realities.

For some years now, Anna Guillot's practice has been investigating the potential of genealogy as an epiphanic catalyst and prism to explore the present. This is what she has also elaborated, if in a lateral way, for « Won't you not see ? Chapter C ». Starting point of her installation « Nucleus (Cor) » is a research around the writings and areas of investigation of her own father who was an author and researcher in agrarian sciences for ICE - I.
Textual printed and autograph material around agrarian sciences, botanic biology, physics chemistry and maths form therefore here the base of the installation which, as often in Anna Guillot's work, finds a further expanded aesthetic and conceptual articulation through a film projection centered on photosynthesis, giving a dual interpretation for the title of the installation putting thus nature and its autogenerative processes on a par with the fatherly figure.
The conceptual hybridization at work in anna guillot's proposal finds also a visual metaphoric resolution in the way notes, fragments, images are inserted and integrated in the projection.
Responding in its specific way to the red thread of the exhibition, the unearthing process of the rhysomatic associative intertextual approach dear to anna Guillot leads to unveil ancestral and primordial characters all too often relegated in oblivion.

Emmanuel Lambion

Promoted by On the Contemporary —in the Garden, KoobookArchive
With the support of Comune di Caltanissetta, torronificio Geraci, Balloon project

NEWS : Ghosts and Nails @ KXX -Überchannel

Emmanuel — 2024-03-02T07:56:30Z

This exhibition inaugurates Überchannel, the programmation organised by Bn PROJECTS @ KXX, in an apartment sublty remodelled by architect Yannick Vergnaud.
This new venue of artistic projects and residencies is located at the 20th floor of an apartment building emblematic of the urban development of Brussels in the 2nd half of 20th century.
KXX overlooks Canal and KANAL - Centre Pompidou and offers an unsurpassed panorama on the European and Belgian capital.

Everything often hangs only by a thread or a nail.
This is namely the case for Ghosts and Nails, the exhibition which inaugurates Überchannel, the new progammation of Bn PROJECTS @ KXX. Overall, it is an exhibition which speaks of meta- / -infra-visibility but also of resistance and resilience. This nail or these threads are for you to find and discover, if not necessarily to use them.

Cheers, mind your joke, fable or prayer, and welcome to Brussels.

Opening on Thursday 21 March 2024, 5 pm.

Quai du Batelage 5 /bell 284
B-1000 Brussels
www.bnprojects.be

Exhibition open on Saturdays, 2-6 pm
and on apointment
from 23/03/2024 until 04/05/2024

Special opening during Art Brussels on Friday 26 April 2024, 2-6 pm

NEWS : Thomas Couderc, Spazio B. 2001 - Melted Pasts for Carved out Futures

Emmanuel — 2024-03-02T07:47:43Z

The works of Thomas Couderc are vitalist, they are overflowing with energy that the format they adopt or the spaces he invests struggles to contain.
Flirting with the derisory, the miraculous and the poetic spurt precisely from this unbalance between the means and energies deployed and the finality or results hoped for.

The creative endeavor is promethean, developing with simple and effective acts of assembly and construction from found materials, often raw and poor, which may also be confronted with cutting-edge technologies, such as drones. For a long time, in fact, he had the ambition to project himself into the intimate life of his sculptural works : he made videos filming them from the inside, with this sometimes being their only form of visibility, exalting in their cinematographic potential.
Couderc's work is also imbued with obsessive fascinations for specific motifs often relating to popular movies culture, and, in particular, childhood (the bear, the cowboy ...), scifi, deployed in an often serial fashion.

Creating a sort of hybrid connection between a retrofuturistic quasi-archeological iconography from a fantasmated past and an equally imaginary possible future, Thomas Courderc's proposal for the concentrated space of Spazio Bidet originates in his fascination for Stanley Kubrick's mythical 2001, A Space Odyssey as starting point for his installation. No bones here, but is indeed to a sort of diachronic journey that Thomas Couderc metaphorically invites the beholder

A fascination for the primeval gestures, and techniques of fashioning is directly visible : technically, on the lower level of the installation, we see carved monumental trunks of cut and engraved wood which refer to the very ancestors of all forms of engraving, the Mesopotamian cylinder-seals which appeared round 3500 b.c.. These trunks have here been carved in relief, serving as rolls marking ephemeral reliefs on earthen surfaces, which, in turn, were used as negative moulds for the founding of the "positive" aluminium reliefs which we see in the vitrine and above, on the redesigned and eponymous ascensional "insegna" of Spazio Bidet.

Two of humanity's most traditional artefact techniques, woodcut and foundry are here associated to elicit and suggest a diachronic journey. The poverty of materials, the massive and raw gestures, the archaic rendering of the iconography, the simplicity of the set-up contrast with these fantasized futuristic projections.

The installation takes advantage of the condensed space of Bidet's vitrine, which it,of course, duly trespasses, to unfold in several distinctive registers : at ground, we see a restored refractory earth low relief confronting motives and inspirations which overwhelmed the artist during a seminal journey to Southern France neolithic caves, namely a spiderlike form evoking an archaic space shuttle, figures of humanoid characters between foetal ancestors or visiting annunakis, a dolmen and a musical human figure. Evoking what is above ground, creating a connection with the upper register, the quasi-Brancusian (but totally rough) infinite column of carved matricial cylinders is confronted with the latter's cast aluminium "offspring". Some of these concentric casts, evoking ad libitum orbital waves, smoke rings, flying saucers, suction cups, Courbet's Origin of the World, or, also, in a humorous way, Spazio Bidet's inspirational name, unfold in an ascensional way, exceeding also the usual exhibition frame offered by Spazio Bidet, thereby suggesting a sort of hardly-coded invitation to connect us diachronically to an imaginary possible future in the cosmos or, conversely, to our primeval origins.

E. Lambion, curator, Bn PROJECTS

Spazio Bidet
Via Giuseppe Giacosa, 11
20127 Milano

13 May > 30 June 2023

Thomas Couderc, Spazio B. 2001 - Melted Pasts for Carved out Futures

Emmanuel — 2024-03-02T07:37:33Z

E. Lambion, curator, Bn PROJECTS

Spazio Bidet
Via Giuseppe Giacosa, 11
20127 Milano

13 May > 30 June 2023

NEWS : Linda Carrara, rifugio

Emmanuel — 2024-02-29T09:48:04Z

Linda Carrara is an Italian painter (b.1984), based in Milano.Retour ligne automatique
Her body of work is strongly articulated on the dialectical multifold relationships between mankind and its natural and man-made environments.Retour ligne automatique
Deeply tinged with an immersive and pervasive feeling of contemplation and mimesis, it plays with subtle to-and-fros between natural elements and their trompe-l'œil pictorial sublimations, whilst sometimes also activating and integrating them at the chore of her creative process.Retour ligne automatique
It is a work of silent and resilient poetry, enhancing the eloquence of each singular element of the inner landscapes or compositions she re/creates.

It is in us,
where landscapes
have landscapes.

Fernando Pessoa

The present show originates in the aesthetic shock the artist experienced upon discovering and visiting the Grotta del Genovese in Levanzo in the Aegadian islands, off Sicily. This Paleolithic cave, discovered in 1949, was inhabited by humans probably between 10 000 and 6 000 bc, and still preserves precious testimonies of Paleolithic civilizations, mostly animal and human portraits alongside more abstract forms.
Impressed by the feeling of liminality that pervaded her upon visiting the cave, oscillating between obscurity and light, the intimate discovery of a remote ancestral past of humanity and the external pregnancy of contemporary times, Linda Carrara has endeavored to recreate this experience in the present show whose very title, rifugio - in phonetic translation - the Italian for shelter, seems to advocate a retreat to pre-or proto-historical times.

Carrara uses the separation wall as a sort of trompe-l'œil stone time slab, metaphorizing the transitional feeling she felt upon entering the cave.

On the floor a labyrinthic abstract sign, inspired by old Camunian symbols and made of fudge gathered on a beach closeby, directly evokes crytpic initiatic engravings. Some drawings, similarly suggesting an attempt at tracing primordial alternative labyrinthic signs or paths, are hung in its vicinity.

The main back wall of the space presents a series of six pictorial frottage canvases entitled La Prima passeggiata (i.e. The First Wandering) envelops the viewer with its deep green vibrant shades. The technique of pictorial frottage, often used by Carrara as a sort of way to convey and transmutate the inner expressivity of architectures and textures, evokes in this context the primordial forces implicitly contained by the tactile reliefs of the cave's walls.

The very gesture of frottage, activating natural silent forces at the chore of Carrara's creative process, stands in a delicate counterpoint to the signs that were painted or engraved by our ancestors in their first natural shelters.

The title of the works acts at a double level, as if it were inviting to an inner voyage that would be as much diachronic as spatial, through time and space, triggering, to quote Pessoa (it is in us that landscapes find a landscape), a mental landscape that can only exist in the beholder's mind.

Primordial natural light and forces emanating from the animal or vegetal worlds absorb us in the depth of In fondo al pozzo & La luce tra le foglie, whilst completing the series of cosmic natural elements directly or indirectly evoked in the show.

Emmanuel Lambion - Bn PROJECTS

for and
@ CENTRUL de INTERES
CLUJ

13/10/22 > 30/11/2022

Linda Carrara, rifugio

Emmanuel — 2024-02-29T09:26:53Z

Linda Carrara is an Italian painter (b.1984), based in Milano.
Her body of work is strongly articulated on the dialectical multifold relationships between mankind and its natural and man-made environments.
Deeply tinged with an immersive and pervasive feeling of contemplation and mimesis, it plays with subtle to-and-fros between natural elements and their trompe-l'œil pictorial sublimations, whilst sometimes also activating and integrating them at the chore of her creative process.
It is a work of silent and resilient poetry, enhancing the eloquence of each singular element of the inner landscapes or compositions she re/creates.

It is in us,
where landscapes
have landscapes.

Fernando Pessoa

Carrara uses the separation wall as a sort of trompe-l'œil stone time slab, metaphorizing the transitional feeling she felt upon entering the cave.

Emmanuel Lambion - Bn PROJECTS

for and
@ CENTRUL de INTERES
CLUJ

13/10/22 > 30/11/2022

NEWS : Mirko Canesi, Save Point

Emmanuel — 2024-02-28T19:38:49Z

Mirko Canesi's (I, 1981 - lives and works in Milan and Brussels) work is protean : It is nevertheless underpinned by lines of force which explore the investment and the concretization of mental and cultural / immaterial universes or, conversely, which explore, the confrontation of these with a physical and natural reality. In a way, his work aims at a dialectical resolution of these components by in fact creating artefacts and hybrid environments where natural and artificial man-made environments come together, and collide.

This is how, fascinated by the world of virtual reality, video games, and gaymers culture, he willingly gives them a physical and sculptural form.
The starting points of the present exhibition are two landmark video games from the early 90's, Shadow of the Beast (published by Psygnosis Limited,1989) and Flashback (developed by Delphine Software, 1992), both set in futuristic jungle environments.
Some details or frame captures of their « natural » backgrounds elements are here materialzed, using different techniques or crafts.

Its very title, Save Point evoking these safe areas of rest which allow the players to capitalize their points, might sound paradoxical, to say the least, or even straightforwardly critical and ironic, since all traces of human presence are erased from these framed landscapes.
In this context, it might rather designate all these post-human environments that will survive humanity, whether it be in natural or virtual reality - the latter possibility being though, at this stage, a contradiction per se.

The first piece which the visitor will discover upon entering the room is a monumental diptych relief, Fregio dei Giganti, the Italian for Frieze of the Giants, assuming, if in a subverted way, Wagnerian overtones, as in a reversed Götterdammerung, where the to-be-extinguished species might be humanity itself.

Realized using different layers of poplar cut by laser before being assembled, Fregio dei Giganti gives a three-dimensional shape to a detailed depiction of these creepers which inform the backgrounds of many a video game, and of Shadow of the Beast in particular.

The promethean gesture of giving a concrete shape to these elements, initially designed to be confined within the two-dimensional space of a (television) screen, is using here advanced 3D printing technologies.

This is not the case in the 3 delicately carved Flashback open terracotta high reliefs which we find on the adjacent walls of the exhibition room.

These manmade virtual environments are here recreated and given life thanks to the hand of the artist himself, resorting to a very traditional crafts technique and material, and adopting a more human scale, akin to the formats of a televisual screen.
Their open framed structures enhance the lone presence of the creepers and of these fantasy platforms whence the humanoïd characters of the game would jump to one another, in an absurd attempt at accumulating more and more points, as a metaphor of the search for constant growth, increasing profits and over-exploitation which has led humanity to the deadlocks that we are now facing.

The last piece of in the exhibition, Rocaille, evokes in it's title the artificial natural grotto structures and follies which would adorn baroque gardens.

It is a contemporary adaptation of the concept that Canesi has been developing over the past years under this title, creating high reliefs made up with colored resin climbing holds used in articificial climbing walls. The present work though offers a subsequent involutive declension of this series, as it is, just as the Flashback reliefs here above, made up of terracotta elements hand-fashioned by the artist.

All in all, the dual and dialectical relationships between man and its environment, whether it be constructed, artificial, virtual or real / material and natural, is expressed in multi-layered ways in Canesi's body of work, with these to-and-fros between relationships of projection and domination and, conversely, a subordination to the fundamental and unstoppable freedom of the natural element : albeit passed through the prisms of prior reconstructions and virtual projections, it will finally overcome humankind, victim of its unstoppable greed and hubris.

Emmanuel Lambion - Bn PROJECTS

for and
FRICHE @ CENTRUL de INTERES
CLUJ

13/10/22 > 30/11/2022