ART CITIES:Turin-Paranormal,Tony Oursler vs Gustavo Rol
Tony Oursler has amassed a vast personal archive of objects and ephemera relating to magic, the paranormal, film, television, phantasmagoria, pseudoscience, and technology. For Oursler, the archive functions as an open visual resource, historical inquiry, and a family history. One of the collection’s many digressions is the friendship between the artist’s grandfather Charles Fulton Oursler and Harry Houdini and their joint campaign against fraudulent mediums.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli Archive
The exhibition “Paranormal. Tony Oursler vs Gustavo Rol” is a collection that includes works by Tony Oursler and a selection of objects belonging to his large collection revolving around the occult, alongside the works in the city collections by the painter and psychic Gustavo Rol, active in Turin in the latter half of the 20th Century. The works were selected by Tony Oursler together with the exhibition curator and showcased in a space conceived by the artist himself. On this occasion, Oursler also displays a new series of works, the “Ex Voto”, inspired by his visit to the Chiesa della Consolata in Turin. Tony Oursler is one of the most innovative artists to use video as an expressive means. Not only are his works expressed in the video image, but they us and combine sculpture, design, installation, multimedia projections, single channel projection, recordings and performances, also interacting with the spectator. In 2016 the artist presented his solo exhibition “Imponderable” at MoMA presented in a “5-D” cinematic environment utilizing a contemporary form of Pepper’s ghost—a 19th-century phantasmagoric device—and a range of sensory effects, Imponderable is an immersive feature-length film inspired by Oursler’s own archive of ephemera relating to stage magic, spirit photography, pseudoscience, telekinesis, and other manifestations of the paranormal. Drawing on these objects, the exhibition weaved together a social, spiritual, and empirical history of the virtual image that overlaps with the artist’s own family history. Gustavo Rol was born in 1903 into an affluent middle-class family from Turin. A personality out of the ordinary, an art lover and a painter himself, educated and charismatic: after working as journalist and bank clerk, he devoted his life to his greatest passion, the occult. His admirers have credited him with paranormal properties; his detractors have spoken of “mentalism”. But Gustavo Rol always professed to be a mere researcher and experimenter, whose sole purpose was “To encourage men to look beyond appearances and stimulate their intelligent spirit”. A man who has lived through the 20th Century, leaving a deep mark in the collective imagination and in the numerous international personalities he came into contact with.
Info: Curators: Paolo Colombo and Marcella Pralormo (Section on Gustavo Rol), Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, Via Nizza, 230, Turin, Duration: 3/11/17-25/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.pinacoteca-agnelli.it
