ART CITES:Rome-Davide Balula
Davide Balula is an artist and a musician. His visual practice investigates chance encounters, random patterns and the passage of time. Working with various media including sound, installation and drawing, he explores the nature of events and correlations. Balula’s installations often take the form of recording devices, unusual measuring tools and scientific experimentations.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive
For “Iron Levels” his first exhibition in Rome, Davide Balula has created an experiential trajectory that responds directly and specifically to the architecture. On entering the exhibition, visitors pass through a sculptural metal detector. A ubiquitous instrument of search and verification, the metal detector makes private belongings into objects of suspicion or potential threat. Its purpose is to reveal the metal, non-bodily material we carry with us each daythat which we habitually treat as extensions of the self. In the first room, the visitor is invited to pick up and handle a stainless-steel ball, which sits in a ball-holder sculpted from local limestone. The carved holder evokes the organic softness and curves of skin, and the rendition of flesh and muscle as expressed by Italian master sculptors. The ball and holder explore the gravitational balance between body and earth, an invitation to consider one’s weight, mass, and density. The second room of the exhibition contains a new series of Balula’s “Burnt Paintings”, made for the sweeping curve of the room’s wall. The works in this series contain two binary elements, one frame holding the charred charcoal residue of burnt wood, and a second frame holding a canvas imprinted with the charcoal of the burnt wood. In groups of two, three, or four frames to a work, these “paintings” sit together in positive and negative relationship, much like that of photography or printmaking. The process of making charcoal is slow and steady, with a gradual increase and decrease of heat so that the wood is not turned into ash, but retains the potential to burn again.
Info: Gagosian Gallery, Via Francesco Crispi 16, Rome, Duration: 21/9-18/11/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:30-19:00, www.gagosian.com