ART CITIES:Rome-Piero Golia

Piero Giolia’s work assumes the form of actions, sculptures, and installations often characterized as being extreme yet poetic. With a particular love for mischief, Golia takes everyday gestures and pushes them to the limit in order to cast an ironic look at contemporary society. Some of Golia’s works have taken the form of adventurous trips, like Going to Tirana (2000), in which he rowed across the Adriatic Sea, moving in the direction opposite from migrants trying to leave Albania.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

Piero Golia constantly subverts the conventions of contemporary art through concept, form, and act. In recent works, he presents his colleagues and artworks as miniature bronzes within studio maquettes. Golia’s “Intermission Paintings” are, to some extent, a byproduct of the first phase of his Comedy of Craft trilogy, a sculptural performance that he conceived in three acts and directed himself. In the first act, produced during “Made in L.A.” at the Hammer Museum in 2014, Golia had an exact-scale replica carved in foam block of George Washington’s nose from Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. In the second act at “Prospect III New Orleans” later in the year, a team of local art students created a plaster mold from the foam replica. In the third and final performance, a bronze cast of the nose will be made from the plaster mold, forever associating America’s first President with the psychoanalytical symbol of primal male fear. For the Intermission Paintings (made during a break between the first and second acts of the performative trilogy) Golia took foam offcuts from the initial phase of the Washington nose, embedded them in a hard layer of polymer, then painted them with iridescent nano-pigments used in security ink for printing bank notes. Noble vestiges of an irreverent action, incidental scraps are transformed into dynamic artifacts. The fortuitously formed panels evoke fractured, striated fossils, their story unfolds in rough edges and abrasions, which are preserved in remarkable colors that oscillate as the viewer moves around them. Within Golia’s self-reflexive epic, the “Intermission Paintings” represent a return to the studio and a new approach to painting born out of vicissitudes. Cultivating history, performance, and chance into mercurial relics, Golia continues to elicit meaning from the indifferent laws of chance.

Info: Intermission Paintings, Gagosian Gallery, Via Francesco Crispi 16, Rome, Duration: 9/6-30/7/15, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri: 10:30-19:00, www.gagosian.com