ART CITIES:Buenos Aires-Diego Bianchi
Diego Bianchi is known for his multi-part sculptural projects using found and manipulated materials, including defunct technologies or recently discarded commercial products, which reflects his interest in ideas of the unclean, the abject, and the wastefulness of contemporary commodity culture. With an underlying sense of loss and an unusual beauty, his dynamic assemblages involve binding, burning, or cementing together these worn objects, creating textured surfaces.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires Archive
For his solo exhibition “The Charming Present” at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Diego Bianchi staged a dialogue between his work and the Museum’s Collection. Bianchi´s works frequently dive into a scene of excess, erosion, chaos, and imbalance, as possible states of matter. His entropic landscapes are a kind of Big Crunch, which brings a strange feeling of harmony to the leftovers of a consumer society. “The Charming Present” includes new works taking the form of devices, situations, and frameworks for the circulation, exhibition, and perception of other artworks, whether they are historical pieces belonging to the Museum or pieces taken from the artist’s own past. He forces the audience into a particular experience with the collection: erasing the pieces’ history and theoretical framework in order to unleash a potential offered by a frantic now. Regarding this exhibition, the artist says: “I’m not particularly interested in tradition or heritage, I think that, as concepts, they fossilize the circulation of ideas. I am interested, however, in setting up different periods so that they co-exist in the same time frame: breaking up time, turning it back on itself, flipping it upside down”. Works by different artists from different periods, be they material monstrosities or precise geometric pieces, live together in a space that breathes fiction, where a pedestal becomes a speaker, the wall is a large optical package and the space set aside for paintings is a street window with railings. No doubt, some of the works have never felt more comfortable while others do not understand how they can have ended up there. During this mingling process, the present devours the past but the past lingers on in the present as a kind of karma. The new story being told is necessarily fluid, a constant flow where stagnation is impossible. Time is shattered. The sculpture does not know what time it is.
Info: Curator: by Javier Villa, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Av. San Juan 350, Buenos Aires, 22/4-6/8/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-20:00, www.buenosaires.gob.ar
