ART-PRESENTATION: On The Spiritual Matter Of Art
The exhibition “on the spiritual matter of art” investigates the issue of the spiritual through the lens of contemporary art and, at the same time, that of the ancient history of Rome. In a layout offering diverse possible paths, the exhibition features the works of 19 artists, leading names on the international scene from very different backgrounds and cultures. Their works were mainly produced in the last two years and reworked specifically for the MAXXI space, are displayed alongside 17 extraordinary Etruscan, Roman and local archaeological relics loaned by four of the city’s leading Museums.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MAXXI Archive
“on the spiritual matter of art” takes its cue from the need of today’s artists to reaffirm the centrality of man and its ecosystem, with all its criticalities and complexity, in the search for a spiritual dimension. An attitude which, if in the past was opposed to the idea of spirituality, today becomes the essence. The artists suggest perspectives able to overcome the differences in a syncretism that contains them and at the same time transcends them, but which is based on the never resolved antinomy between body and soul, matter and spirit, rational and irrational. Coming from some of the main national museums in Rome, the archaeological finds on display are testimony to man’s need to relate to the divine, the supernatural. Objects and artefacts are from a period that runs from the birth of Rome in the 8th century BC up to the edict of Constantine (313 AD) and then of Thessalonica (380 AD), an act that establishes the definitive assertion of Christian monotheism and the end of the archaic period. Works of the exhibition:
Matolde Cassani, “Tutto” (2019 ): The large tent with the writing “Tutto” (All), placed at the entrance of the exhibition, is the metaphor of a threshold to cross, rite of passage that introduces the visitor to the theme of spirituality. The work evokes a syncretic dimension, a shared rituality, a particular attention to the architectural aspect and “performativity that creates the space”, as Cassani, who trained as an architect, declares. The piece on display is taken from a complex project consisting of a performance and several fabric elements, conceived on the occasion of Manifesta 12 in Palermo. Observing the tradition of Sicilian baroque and reflecting on the religious and cultural influences that characterise the history of the city, the artist blends different rituals creating an unexpected celebration in the heart of the historic centre. The title “Tutto “contains and expresses precisely the will to mix people, ideological differences, elements of popular tradition, the past and the present, in a single great celebratory moment.
John Armleder, “Skateboarding is not a Crime” (2019): In fifty years of career John Armleder has distinguished himself for the conscious choice to avoid an exclusive expressive medium and recognisable style, thus opening himself to multiform experiments that combine painting, sculpture, environmental installation, performance, video, sound and even text. His oeuvre challenges the concepts of authorship and uniqueness of the work of art and welcomes and transforms the everyday, sublimating it into a chaotic triumph of shapes, materials and colors. The series of “Pour Paintings” of which the painting “Skateboarding is not a Crime” (2019), is part, is characterised by large drippings of pictorial matter on large canvases. Among vibrant colours, glimmers of gold and silver, Armleder’s sensitivity plays – not without an unexpected ironic and irreverent vein – on the thin line that divides the great tradition of abstract art and pure decoration.
Francesco Clemente, “Crown” (1988): Manifestly evident in Francesco Clemente’s oeuvre are symbols and iconographic references from the Western figurative tradition and the aniconic Eastern one, resulting in a co-presence of cultures and aesthetics that derive from the sensitivity developed by the artist during the long periods of time he has spent between New York and India over the past four decades. With particular attention toward forms and especially the human figure, Clemente’s works encourage cultural and formal elements that are distant from each other, and foster the conversation and relationship between different spatialities and temporalities. Even the ten-meter long triptych Crown, a tangle of signs and patterns alluding to the crown of thorns, combines the Christian iconography of the Passion of Christ and the concept of “weaving” in the Tantric sphere. Crown is a crucial work in the artist’s career, because it is where Clemente begins to interpret the spiritual via abstract forms, availing himself of visual patterns and Eastern symbols.
Enzo Cucchi, “Idoli e scopritori del fuoco” (2010-14): An extraordinary inventor of powerful and enigmatic images, the research of Enzo Cucchi encompasses dreamlike visions, the mystical and religious popular culture of his native land (the Marches) and art history, with explicit references to classical literature and mythology. His aesthetic ranges from time to history, thus synthesizing individual myths and collective sensitivity. Legend and rite are also present in the recent corpus of works entitled “Idoli e scopritori del fuoco”, a series of bronze sculptures installed on slender cement columns. Small figures that harken back to an archaic world, half men and half gods, idols and the discoverers of fire, wizards, haruspices, vestals, connotated by symbols and iconographic references. Once again, Cucchi has conceived a complex symbolic alphabet, where figurative elements and abstract elements share a total vision in which life and death are seen as the inseparable parts of a single existential cycle.
Elisabetta Di Maggio, “Greetings from Venice” (2018): Time is the central theme of Elisabetta Di Maggio’s artistic research. Time as the invisible force in human dynamics, such as memory and historical stratification, but also as a connection between different temporalities, between past and future, for a reinterpretation of the present time through the gaze of yesterday and vice versa. This feeling takes shape in large-scale installations that consider the place that hosts them and its history. The same may be said for “Greetings from Venic”, conceived for the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, the city’s ancient trading place and post office headquarters. Here the reference is to the extraordinary tile floor of Saint Mark’s Basilica: the abstract ornaments, formal and conceptual maps, become a collage of almost a thousand used postage stamps from every nation in the world. A network of relations that transpires in Di Maggio’s artistic process, in a collective ritual that witnessed the participation of a group of students in the minutious and creative gesture of collecting, classifying, and composing the small paper tiles one by one.
Jimmie Durham, “FIRE CUP” (2019): Multimedia artist, poet, and essayist, Jimmie Durham’s works are deconstructions of the socio-political diktats imposed by the dominant cultures, reappropriating himself of the needs, the spiritual journeys, the drives underlying humans. His reinterpretation of reality is expressed in mysterious gravity-defying sculptures, assemblages of various materials and objects, with a prevalence for those of natural origin alongside industrial artefacts. The never-before-exhibited “FIRE CUP”, whose only elements are the oak wood and the basalt stone carved by the artist, encompasses the deep meaning of the ancestral rite (the reference here is to the Holy Grail) and the versatile and generating power of nature. The concave shape of the surface also recalls the cupules (cupstones, in the language of the Americans Indians), hollows made by humans since the Paleolithic period on the surface of masses and inside which wooden sticks were rubbed to light sacred fires.
Haris Epaminonda, “Untitled #13 t/g” (2019): Sculptures, photographs, books, ceramics, footages: crafted and found objects that Haris Epaminonda assembles in rigorous site-specific installations, with which she outlines a space suspended in time and elaborates a personal visual vocabulary consisting of associations between different elements. Just like Untitled #13 t/g, in her works there are multiple visual-narrative readings, and numerous are the historical, artistic, biographical and autobiographical references, the dreams and the memories that together create new and enigmatic tales: archaic worlds, myths, legends, symbols are transformed and acquire unexpected meanings as they become works of art. Much like a large-scale collage, Epaminonda identifies objects whose materialness, property, and symbology she is familiar with (in the work exhibited, two reflecting structures, a velvet curtain and two golden spheres), using them to create spaces that are motionless, silent, absolute in their geometries, metaphysical in their timeless nature.
Hassan Khan, “Live Ammunition!” (2015) & “LightShift” (2015): Artist, musician, writer, Hassan Khan uses a variety of means of expression, from the video to the installation, from sound to performance art, as instruments aimed at a linguistic-conceptual research that poses ongoing existential questions. The two works, “Live Ammunition!” and “LightShift”, respectively a multi-channel composition for clapping hands and a beam of colored light that varies slowly but constantly, together create a multisensory space welcoming the visitor at the exhibition entrance, thus delineating a suspended space, “something to briefly belong to before it passes”. It is indeed a place of passage, which becomes the site of an initiatory rite: “it might take a moment to walk through a room but it is also always a transition”, the artist remarks. The ritual of hand-clapping in Khan’s work accompanies references to the present time, like the marches in the square after the Egyptian coup d’état in 2013, which the title “Live Ammunition!” alludes to.
Kimsooja, “Mandala” (2003): A South Korean artist of American origin and adoption, Kimsooja carries out a conceptual research that investigates the dualistic nature of the existing, the balance between opposites, uniting elements of together Oriental and Western philosophy and aesthetics. From her earliest works we can see a strong focus on color and its symbolic values: an example is the famous series “Bottari” (1992) based on the scheme of the five Korean colors, known as obangsaek, which tradition associates with cardinal points and natural elements. In the work on display, the first version of which in 2003 had the subtitle “Zone of Zero” sound, colour and matter come together in the harmonic form of a Buddhist maṇḍala. Combining sacred and profane, pop images and religious expressions, the artist echoes Tibetan, Islamic and Gregorian chants in a jukebox speaker. Creating a balance between different traditions and cultures, the work explores the concept of totality and unity between body and mind as a state to reach zero degree of the spirit.
Aboulaye Konaté, “Ocean, Mother and Life” (2015): Aboulaye Konaté’s works are known for their pattern of horizontal fabrics in bright colors. The artist’s reflections on the socio-political emergencies of the contemporary age, interpreted through the magnifying lens of Mali, the artist’s native country, are translated in his oeuvre in large two-dimensional colored installations. The aesthetic of the forms and the symbols, both figurative and abstract, is prevalent here. Hence, “Ocean, Mother and Life” appears to be a homage to water – a vital element, but one that was hard to obtain during Konaté’s childhood – to the power of the sea, to the ocean as deity and generating mother. Here, the environmentalist reflection inherent in the work, a warning in times of emergency and water pollution around the planet, is triggered from the figurative composition the artist creates by using materials typical of Malian tradition, in this case colored fabrics and cloth. The result of this is an abundant universe of marine flora and fauna, an atmosphere filled with cultural, religious, social, historical meanings, a symphony of threads and colors that opens up to another level, a timeless and spiritual one, of space.
Victor Man, “Two Skulls After El Greco and Blackbird” (2017-2018), “Moonlight (All Nations Flag)” (2018) and “Self-Portrait With The Yellow Shadow of Christ” (2018-19): The painting of Victor Man are characterised by recurring attention to the portrait in the foreground and a nonrealistic use of color, with dark and cold shades, reminiscent of the images reflected by the Claude glass (or black mirror), an ancient instrument used by landscapers in the 17th Cntury. The titles of the works have a strong descriptive value that, without ever completely revealing it, announce the subject of his compositions which always remains enigmatic. In the three works on display, we find different expressions of Man’s complex iconography based on personal memories and literary and artistic citations – this is the case of “SelfPortrait With The Yellow Shadow of Christ” which refers to a famous work by Paul Gauguin – on disturbing and surreal elements as in “Moonlight (All Nations Flag)” and on a dark and ambiguous religiosity as in the contemporary memento mori of T”wo Skulls After El Greco and Blackbird”.
Shirin Neshat, “Offerings” (2019): The images that form “Offerings” reclaim the compositional aesthetics of the series “Women of Hallah” (1993-97), one of the most famous works by Shirin Neshat that marks the beginning of her reflection on the complexity of Islamic culture and its traditions in relation to female identity. In this new work, the characteristic and sophisticated play of light and shadow, black and white, of her photographs encounters the narrative power of the gesture which gradually expresses itself as prayer, offering, revelation. In her hands emerge the verses of Persian poet Omar Khayyam, who lived around the year 1000, reciting “Without pure wine I cannot exist”. A recurring theme in Khayyam’s controversial and extraordinary output, oscillating between scepticism and mysticism, wine is celebrated as a symbol of earthly pleasure, enjoyment of life and at the same time as a tool, one of the simplest and oldest, to allow man to enter into a direct relationship with the divine.
Yoko Ono, “Add Color (Refugee Boat)” (1960/2016-19): A multitalented artist and a leading figure on the contemporary art scene, in the 1960s Yoko Ono was among the first exponents of Fluxus and also one of the first to experiment with performance. This installation exhibited is part of a series of works, conceived in 1960, a few years after Ono’s arrival in the United States. By inviting the visitor to “add colour” on the surfaces of the work “Add Color” explores the human sensibility and diversity in regard to universal concepts such as freedom and hope, peace and love. The work thus becomes a rite in the hands of this artist-shaman, and rituality that is shared by the public is a moment of collective reflection on major contemporary questions. A case in point is the variant Refugee Boat, where migrant boats are a metaphor for salvation, division, and at the same time journey to the unknown. By arranging jars of blue paint in the exhibition space, Ono lets the public draw a ‘sea’ that is favorable for these boats, with waves of words and shared gestures.
Michal Rovner, “Nilus” (2018): The photographs and videos of Michal Rovner harken back to the dramatic events of recent history which the artist re-elaborates in forms with ambiguous, mysterious, fleeting contours. Hovering between metaphysical contemplation and an analysis of the human condition, Rovner’s shapes are divested of details, and the figures in miniature present in her works become the anonymous ranks of men who together form a sign alphabet, a reference to hieroglyphics and the Hebrew alphabet. In “Nilus” at the heart of this moving narrative one can glimpse a jackal slowly turning its head toward the viewer: the sacred animal of Egyptian iconography, the jackal identified Anubis, the god of death and tombs, represented as a man with the head of a canid. In the enigmatic nature of works such as this one Rovner expresses her deep existential interest in duality, in what is true and what is fake, in the rational and the irrational, in life and in death.
Remo Salvadori, “Alfabeto” (2019): Metal is a recurring material in the works of Remo Salvadori, an artist who has been studying the alchemical properties of the elements since the 1970s, calling into play the energetic forces that characterize them. The large-scale installation “Alfabeto” encompasses the thinking of the inventor of anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner with regards to primary geometric figures (the square as the symbol of the Earth, and the circle as a metaphor for celestial geometry), the seven metals (lead, tin, iron, copper, mercury, silver, gold), and their process of transformation. Hence, on the wall is a sign grammar made up of lines, planes, and shapes that the artist has worked by hand. The combination of forces and materiality produces harmony that is both geometric and metaphysical. In Salvadori’s oeuvre, the author’s insight and the viewer’s contemplation are alchemically bound; they are intimate, inseparable, and consequential aspects of the creative process.
Tomás Saraceno, “Floating Nephila Ensemble” (2016): Fluctuating sculptures, community projects, and interactive installations distinguish the work of Tomás Saraceno, whose research brings together art, architecture, science, astrophysics, and engineering to explore new sustainable ways to inhabit the Earth. The two works on display tell of the artist’s interest in arachnology, the scientific and social study of spiders and the webs they weave. Floating Nephila Ensemble is a wind instrument that captures in real time the movement of the threads of a spider’s web produced by the Nephila inaurata species, translating it into sonic frequencies. The work is a collective performance, produced by an ensemble of forces and bodies. In this immersive environment, every subtle change alters the compositional whole, where the visitors and aerial elements (dust, wind, heat and electrostatic forces) influence the rhythms of the fluctuating silk threads. In conversation with this work are the Arachnomancy Cards, a set of cards, taking inspiration from different divinatory practices. They are an instrument of mediation, messengers between the perceptive worlds, and one of the many ways to consult spider/web oracles. In the divinatory practice of arachnomancy the prophecy is written in the silk threads, and their different interpretations articulate interdisciplinary ways of understanding and perceiving the interconnection between different species, between the living and the nonliving, in the current era of geo-environmental crisis.
Sean Scully, “Window Diptych Green” (2018): After a rigorous and minimal debut, in the past four decades the poetics of Sean Scully have opened up more to colour and light, representing on the canvas the relationship between the abstract gesture and the everyday visual experience. The paint the artist applies to surfaces made of aluminum, felt, glass, to sculptures and architectures becomes fluid and reflects an idea he especially cherishes, that of a “universal personal”. The color fields, previously geometric patterns, are transformed into rhythmical narratives that are kindled in empathy with the viewer: vibrant and restless like the brushstrokes they are “places of expectation and. revelation, seismographs capable of capturing the uncertainty of the human heart”. Held down on the surface are everyday elements, windows that open onto the interior of the architectural line of the work: the geometry of “Window Diptych Green”, a square characterized by colored stripes inside a square with black and white stripes -and vice versa- introduce to an exploration of depths. It is a pictorial threshold that lead to another level of perception and sensitivity, a point of passage that, like the mundus, connects the immanent world with the transcendent one.
Jeremy Shaw, “Liminals” (2017): Jeremy Shaw’s work explores the concept of transcendence through the use of different media and a psychedelic aesthetic in which science and mysticism overlap. “Liminals” is the second chapter of the “Quantification” Trilogy, a science fiction series that narrates revolutionary solutions devised by clandestine groups to avert extinction of the human species. The video takes the form of an old documentary filmed in 16 mm, in which a hypnotic voice-over describes the experience of eight characters trying to save humanity by strengthening their brain with cybernetic DNA and rediscovering at the same time spiritual practices of the past. The goal of this syncretic ritual, which combines dance, yoga and headbanging, is to reach The Liminal, a dimension halfway between the physical and the virtual world, through which it will be possible to access a new evolutionary phase. The symbolic use of colour indicates the catharsis of the protagonists who, from a world in black and white, finally reach a technicolour dimension.
Namal Siedlecki “Trevis” (2019): Inspired by the famous Trevi Fountain, “Trevis” is the title of the galvanic bathtub on show, where the encounter between contemporary rituals and the past is expressed through a process of transformation under the viewer’s eye. In the galvanic bath, coins and medals from the waters of the Roman monument that the artist has recovered from among those that Caritas is not able to convert back into money are dissolved. The copper of this strange treasure made of suspended desires is slowly deposited on the wax copy of the sculpture of a wayfarer, an ex-voto from the French city of Clermont-Ferrand. Here, in the 1960s, an extraordinary collection of wooden artefacts was found, ex-votos that the Gauls threw into a spring to pay homage to the deity Maponos. The gesture of throwing objects into water as a magic and propitiatory rite celebrates man’s innate need to connect with the supernatural that links him beyond centuries and cultural differences, resisting scientific and technological progress.
Participating Artists: John Armleder, Matilde Cassani, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Elisabetta Di Maggio, Jimmie Durham, Haris Epaminonda, Hassan Khan, Kimsooja, Abdoulaye Konaté, Victor Man, Shirin Neshat, Yoko Ono, Michal Rovner, Remo Salvadori, Tomás Saraceno, Sean Scully, Jeremy Shaw and Namsal Siedlecki.
Info: Curator: Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Via Guido Reni 4a-8, Rome, Duration: 17/10/19, Days & Hours: Wed, Thu & Sun 11:00-19:00, Tue & Fri-Sat 11:00-20:00, www.maxxi.art
