AlbumArte | FLASH!
AlbumArte | FLASH! is a series of short-exhibitions hosted by AlbumArte for a maximum period of 15 days. The cycle includes itinerant shows, exhibitions that focus on a specific artistic feature, special events or shows that are produced by other foundations and museums, both in Italy andor abroad, presented for the first time to the public of Rome. These projects complete AlbumArte’s objectives research, contributing to the development of the dynamic and, inclusive platform that, as a young independent space, AlbumArte has been able to establish in the city.
Cosimo Veneziano | Break the window and steal the fragments!
"Break the window and steal the fragments!" (January 29th – February 10th, 2018) is the first exhibition of Cosimo Veneziano (Moncalieri 1983) in Rome. This event is the first of the cycle AlbumArte | Flash!. The exhibition, curated by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini, presented a series of works which reflect on the ideas of Monument and Body. The monument as an object of national and personal identity is always subject to the unstoppable passing of time. Public works of the past could end up losing their power to be witnesses of something relevant, as the prominence or purpose of such works is nowadays decontextualized by the persistent flow of further recent events. The monument of an overthrown dictator as well as the sign of an institution that has given work to many people both lie today abandoned and devastated by neglect, when before instilled respect and expressed authority. Once interpreter of the projections of those who admired it or to whom it was intended in the public sphere of the monument and of the public work, the feeling of the Other, in addition to the gaze, begins to appear and to insinuate, differentiating itself, the presence of the individual. The invididuals. The community is taken in such a specific form, that it becomes fragments and individualiseds. Not the single person that has inspired the monument, but that for which it was created, that is, the individual, and consequently, the personal sphere. Here Veneziano explores and formulate different hypothesis. Not a recycling of the matter, but rather a reinterpretation of residual matter that triggers the artist’s reflection, over that precise moment in which the public becomes private; the artist begins to consider the involvement of other smaller stories which for him are, evidently, just as relevant. He breaks down and shatters the idea of public work and brings back to us what it remains, giving it another life as; its life is embedded in interpretation.
Dove sono in questa storia (2018) by Cosimo VenezianoAlbumArte
Many of Cosimo Veneziano’s works exemplify his personal reinterpretation of the effigies of the past: the artist does not speculate on the relics of the past; he rather inaugurates a kind of new life of the artefact.
So, is this a monument? (2018) by Cosimo VenezianoAlbumArte
In this work, the artist intervenes on the fountain in via Verolengo in Turin, where once stood the factory of Superga. After a meticulous study on written materials, the artist concentrated his focus on a tiny group of female factory workers, and especially on the meaning and significance of the repetitive gestures they performed.
These small hands become emblematic of a contradictory system, revealing capitalism’s strengths and weaknesses: economic prosperity, job opportunities, but also exploitation of human labor, workers’ struggles and protests.
Quite solo, exhibition view (2018) by Dario Agati and Fabio Giorgi AlbertiAlbumArte
Dario Agati, Fabio Giorgi Alberti | Quite solo
The artists Dario Agati (Caltagirone, 1990) and Fabio Giorgi Alberti (The Netherlands, 1980) present a series of new pictorial works and installations in the double personal exhibition Quite solo, (February 15th- March 1st, 2018) introducing their original research to the public. The artists realised the exhibition at AlbumArte, curated by Carla Capodimonti and Marta Silvi, as joint winners of the Dancity Open Call 2017 Control Reversal, which is part of the Dancity Art Session, on the occasion of the Dancity Festival (11th edition) in Foligno (Umbria). Dancity Festival is an international festival of culture and electronic music born in 2006, organized by the Cultural Association Dancity with the aim of promoting research and experimentation in various creative fields.The jury of the Control reversal Award, composed of prominent names in the national art scene, after a careful discussion, established an ex-aequo. Dario Agati and Fabio Giorgi Alberti have been awarded. Dario Agati for the adherence to the concept of the call and the ability to express with high formal quality the sense of insecurity of a generation. Fabio Giorgio Alberti for the ability to build a kinetic installation made of everyday materials that can create an estrangement with respect to the exhibition eighteenth century context and for having been able to combine the conceptual matrix to an expressionist doing.
A certain unpredictability of choices characterizes the work of Dario Agati, which is linked to the - often long - time employed by the artist for the realization of each work. These choices tend to change and take new shapes according to the necessities of the moment, stratified by specific temporal evolutions. With the ironic tone that distinguishes his work, Agati breaches the boundaries transforming the art of painting into a medium that blends with desire.
Column (2018) by Fabio Giorgi AlbertiAlbumArte
Giorgi Alberti instead works on a broader concept of time, understood as an empathic experience between the authorial self and the spectatorial us. At the basis of the participatory research to which the artist submits his works is the encounter of different visual spaces, within specific temporal coordinates.
Quite solo, exhibition view (2018) by Dario Agati and Fabio Giorgi AlbertiAlbumArte
Uranium, Cement and Graphite, exhibition view (2018) by Zaelia BishopAlbumArte
Zaelia Bishop | Uranium, Cement and Graphite
"Uranium, Cement and Graphite" unveils a series of site specific works, all of which have never been previously exhibited, expressing a completely new kind of focus and representing the most recent path developed by Bishop in the last couple of years. The works are designed as a reflection on margins and boundaries, both material and mental.What’s beyond the limits of form? What delineates a space? What’s on the other side of the margin? Be it the irregular line drawn between two countries, the sides of a polygon, or the fragmented edge of a stone, Zaelia Bishop investigates these issues through his artistic process. Marble waste, pencil mines, organic and botanical objects become the catalysts to trigger a chain reaction in our thinking – inspiring a way to think differently and, perhaps, better.
Pieces of travertine, granite and slate become carriers of a fracture, highlighted by a thin layer of color.
Uranium, Cement and Graphite, exhibition view (2018) by Zaelia BishopAlbumArte
In these works, the fracture is the natural element that contrasts with the linear definition of the stone’s artificial cut. We can’t but recognize the suffering, the end of a rational project, of entanglement of nature. At the same time, it represents a return to the origin.
AUBE (2018) by Zaelia BishopAlbumArte
It is perhaps an attempt to reunite with something that had been lost, like the meaning of the titles. These words are the result of a liberation from significance, evoking something mysterious and archaic.
Delphine Valli | CLIMAX
For the fourth appointment of the AlbumArte | Flash! series, Delphine Valli’s personal exhibition Climax inaugurated on May 21st, 2019, curated by Claudio Libero Pisano and hosted at AlbumArte. For her first solo show at AlbumArte, Delphine Valli (Champigny-sur-Marne, France, 1972, now living and working between France and Italy) realizes a series of works on the wall, drawings, linear elements, all of which are original and site-specific. These become a set of plastic interventions activating an unexpected dialogue with the whole exhibition space. The works interact and complement each other in the encounter with the solidity of the existing architecture, forming an atypical relation.In her research, the artist has always explored the tensions between artistic intervention and the space, engaging with the latter as a plastic element. Indeed, her works are not so much about themselves as they are about the space with which they relate. The geometry of her installations is ambiguous and triggers a new relationship with the perception of the known reality, aimed at contemplating the extraordinary nature of every ordinary thing. Valli maintains that if sculpture is the art of space, it questions its substance. The use of wall color in sculpture stimulates the space and not the surface: thus painting, in sculpture, becomes immaterial. The issue at stake is the expression of the passage from the material to the immaterial and vice versa, bringing the gaze in fluctuation between the two, with the aim of finally arriving at a synthesis which eludes the automatism in the reception of a space that is known or recognized.The exhibition has received the patronage of Institut français Italia. AlbumArte wishes to thank the architectural and urban planning practice Labics. Special thanks to IRI REAL ESTATE | Investments and Real Estate Sales.
CLIMAX, exhibition view (2019) by Delphine ValliAlbumArte
The interventions are characterized by soft and apparently inconsistent shapes, which offer a different look on pre-established forms, suggesting a way out of that which is already defined.
Surface Tensions (2019) by Delphine ValliAlbumArte
A geometric shape may serve different understandings: if one is willing to rethink its point of view, it can become a driving force for different perceptive strategies.
In this path which is deliberately fluctuating, the focus is on the value of emptiness, understood as potential and never as a lack.
CLIMAX, exhibition view (2019) by Delphine ValliAlbumArte
Texts: Cristina Cobianchi, Alice Isabella Leone and excerpts from curatorial
Translations: Fabiola Fiocco, Carolina Gatti
Photo: Sebastiano Luciano
Video: Matteo Pisapia
Coordination: Fabiola Fiocco, Alice Leone
Project management: Cristina Cobianchi
We would like to thank from the bottom of our hearts everyone who contributed to the making of this project and also everyone who shared their knowledge with us.
You are all set!
Your first Culture Weekly will arrive this week.