There are exhibitions that are organised around a theme and there are exhibitions that quite simply evolve, based on certain more subtle characteristics like, for example, an affinity between the artists on show. Here the Vistamare gallery presents a project born out of a desire for visual, conceptual and human collaboration and the gaze that one artist fixes on the work of another.
When we find ourselves confronted with an encounter characterised by this kind of spontaneity, the gallery space acquires what is almost the warmth of a home, welcoming in an exhibition formed of space and light, of simple gestures and of a succession of fragmented narratives.
The French-Italian couple Marie Cool (born in 1961, she lives and works in Paris) and Fabio Balducci (born in 1964, he also lives and works in Paris) take their inspiration from the painting and choreography of the 1960s and 1970s, looking to these two traditions with the scope of rendering them newly contemporary. Their work presents living forms and living material, and brings to life both form and material. They move objects – slowly – in performances that dilate the rhythm of seemingly negligible actions, as though the loop were a single moment.
The work of Rosa Barba (born in 1972, she lives and works in Berlin) embraces film, sound and text. In fact her installations make use of all the elements found in the language of cinema, using them separately or in unexpected combinations and stimulating the viewer to perceive the film-object in novel ways. In her work these various elements always retain their individuality, becoming almost characters in their own right, acting – like strange presences – in a surreal tableau.
Joseph Kosuth (born in 1945, he lives and works between Rome and New York) was a key figure in the redefinition of the art object which took place in the 1960s and 1970s with the development of conceptual art, putting into question the traditional forms and practices of art as well as the related theories. In doing all this Kosuth was one of the first artists to adopt strategies of appropriation, using texts, photographs, installations and the media. In Kosuth’s work art itself is fundamentally a process of interrogation. As a consequence every aspect of artistic activity is reconsidered, from the function of art objects to the role of the exhibition itself and its layout.
Since the mid 1960s Ettore Spalletti (born in 1940, he lives and works in Capelle sul Tavo) has been creating an artistic language suspended between painting and sculpture, his attention focused on light and space, recalling – in equal measure – abstract modernism and the geometries of renaissance painting. His fields of colour fill minimalist forms which, whilst seemingly contained within their own geometric confines, are rendered evocative by the quality of the brushwork that informs them. Spalletti’s work is characterised by delicate colours that are always permeated by the white of gesso, which stops them from becoming fixed in a definitive version of themselves, giving the surfaces a sense of space and possibility that recalls life itself and its figurativeness.