The Vistamare gallery in Pescara opens the 2009 exhibition season with Daniele Puppi’s solo exhibition Zero. The project, conceived expressly for this exhibition, will involve the entire gallery space through an installation that runs through all 12 rooms. With this project the artist brings to life an “extra-dimension”, a new spatial reality for the location which, in this way, comes to generate the work itself.
Considered by Italian and international critics to be a figure of note on the contemporary art scene, Daniele Puppi (born in 1970) has already seen his work presented at institutions as prestigious as the MART, Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Rovereto (2003), Frank Gehry’s Herford Museum of Art and Design in Germany (2006) and Milan’s Hangar Bicocca (2008). His work will also be on show at London’s Spring House in the summer of 2009.
Up until now Puppi’s artistic language has developed primarily through two media: the video/sound installations entitled “Fatiche” [labours] which are born from the direct encounter with the physical space that is destined to play host to them, and his “Frammenti” [fragments], colour photographs of the installations that freeze a precise moment in time, in this way becoming autonomous pieces of work.
In the Pescara exhibition for the first time Daniele Puppi intervenes in the space without the use of video installations. The project develops along a dynamics of movement: instantaneous events that erupt with intensity, running through the void, to be taken here in the sense of the true essence of the space. The piece modifies our perceptions of the space and provokes a real sensory short-circuit in the viewer. The artist’s aim is to propose a new and radical experience, a work that is immediately visible, audible and tangible.
Zero, therefore, represents a new aspect in Daniele Puppi’s work and, as the artist explains, it expresses, “the search for new speeds of diffusion, until a rhythm is found which, sometimes dizzying, sustains the movement and its ever-different repetition“.
In a sign of the fraternity of contemporary art and literature, on Sunday 8th February at 12.00am, Pescara’s Auditorium Petruzzi will host the presentation of a new book by the writer Lu Ragos, “Due e 10” (Edizione Cattedrale).
Lu Ragos and Daniele Puppi, whilst adopting different artistic means of expression, carry on a parallel research: for Ragos the page is simply a container, as the Vistamare gallery is for Puppi, an instrument in which to give life to fragments that, arrow-like, make straight for the heart. “It is not contaminated ideas that should be our masters, but a synthesis that will reawaken us without many embellishments, and flashes of perception“, sustains Lu Ragos. The empty space enters and exits these artists as though it were a sacred space, a vital space, that pares itself down until it becomes the non-place in which to inscribe the new. The synthesis of this poetics is expressed well in “Vistamare“, one of the tales to be found in “Due e 10“: “… The empty spaces create something other, which transforms them anew. Everything fills up, everything empties and is encountered again. …Dedicated to Daniele Puppi, the artist who occupies space to make it explode“.
Daniele Puppi was born in Pordenone in 1970. He currently lives in Rome and London.
Daniele Puppi’s work is always conceived taking as its starting point the space that hosts it, and it is configured as a response to the stimuli that this architecture induces. Whilst this is, always, a peremptory hypothesis, the work will, independently of its morphology, always be fluid, dynamic and surprising. In fact the artist expresses himself through video, the language of images in movement, of light and sound, all immaterial and energetic elements that form a counterpoint to the static physicality of the structure. … Puppi’s work always creates a dialectic between opposing poles, in which there comes into play a rhetoric that is based on instruments of dissociation. The images that the artist projects onto the wall are frequently gigantic and out of proportion or incongruous in relation to their context; the space itself is recorded in movement, in this way disturbing our rational experience of it through the presence of veritable perceptive deceptions. Therefore Puppi’s work becomes an opportunity for the viewer to undergo an overwhelming sensory experience, no longer merely visual, no longer merely intellectual (Giorgio Verzotti).
The artist has participated in numerous exhibitions in recent years. Among his solo exhibitions: FATICA n.17, Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, Rome (2002); FATICA n.21, MART Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rovereto (2003); FATICA n.25, Lisson New Space, Lisson Gallery, London (2004); FATICA n.28, Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes (2005); FATICA n.27, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Melbourne, Australia (2005); FATICA n.16, Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008). Among his group shows: FATICA n.18 – EXIT, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2002); FATICA n.22 – Forse Italia, S.M.A.K – Stedelijk Museum Voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium (2003); FATICA n.15 – Tupper und video, Marta Herford, Germany (2006); FATICA n.26 – ITALY MADE IN ART: NOW, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China (2006); GOOONG –Taking Time, M.A.R.C.O. Museum, Vigo, Spain (2007).