Sistema: New Acquisitions and Young Artists of the Farnesina Collection

On the fourth floor of Palazzo della Farnesina, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, holds a collective exhibition displaying the new acquisitions that have entered the Ministry’s Collection since the end of 2013 to the present day. The exhibition presents a selection of artworks that intend to testify to the multifarious voices and expressions of Italy’s contemporary art scene of the last twenty years, with particular focus on the young generations. Part of the works are by artists who participated in the various editions of the ITaliens exhibition held at the Italian Embassy in Berlin (2010-2011), while the other artworks have been selected by the Board of Advisors for the Ministry Collection.  
Due to the heterogeneous nature of the works, the order of display has been laid out according to support and technique—a solution offering an inevitably partial reading of the works and of their authors, who in many cases articulate their artistic production through a variety of disciplines.
Further information about the authors and the contexts in which their works originated—some of which are part of wider projects or were conceived on specific occasions, such as residencies, site-specific projects, etc.—, can be found in the single entries on the pages that follow. 

Born in Genoa, Vanessa Beecroft has lived part of her life in Malcesine, on Lake Garda, graduating in Stage Design at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan in 1993. Brera was where she first became familiar with anorexia and bulimia, two disorders that were to become major stimuli in her artistic research centered on the image of the female body. Her personal need for psychoanalytical introspection led to Despair (1985-1993), a journal in which the artist recorded her complex relation with food, a work later followed by large-size canvases and then performances, each titled with a progressive number-code. Although Beecroft operates in the field of performance art, her output retains a strong connection to painting, as clearly testified by the quality of her videos in their exploration of visual concepts. “The drawings,” affirms Beecroft, “are the girls’ ugly and demented spirits. That which I would prefer to eliminate over time.” The artist’s naïve and infantile drawings, channeling her intimate needs, are a key towards the understanding of the pictorial quality of her performances.

Massimiliano Gioni’s interview with Vanessa Beecroft: “Un anno di arte/Vanessa Beecroft. ‘A tu per tu’ con Vanessa Beecroft,” Flash Art, no. 228, June-July, 2001.

Danilo Bucchi lives and works in Rome, New York, and Beijing. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome where he also attained a Master’s degree in photography. His signature black varnish sign, inscribed with a syringe, is typical of his latest works. The black pigment intersects and drips, with the color outlining imaginary creatures’ faces, such as dolls and other invented characters inhabiting a world of dream that seems to portray today’s crazed human population. Each of Bucchi’s works originates, as the artist himself explains, “from a circular movement of the arm, that traces the first line and then continues on and on, starting to build up an independent state of mind. I do not know whether to call it a trance, a state of autism, or what else. All I know is that at one point the balance of the white canvas is broken and a new balance starts to form.” There seems to be a certain affinity with the Surrealist trance, which Bucchi acknowledges as a privileged creative moment, in which the subconscious is free to express itself.

www.danilobucchi.com

Born in Reggio Calabria, Gianluca Malgeri lives in Berlin and Florence. He is an explorer of contemporary myths, onto which he exerts his unprejudiced intervention. “The map” explains Malgeri, “must be read as a […] graphic rendition of experience. Throughout the pre-digital age, maps were compiled after a journey across lands that had never been explored or mapped before, and inevitably, in creating the map, the traveler’s experiences were graphically interpolated into the picture. The map is therefore the consequence of an experience, but can also be the cause of new routes […]. I have decided to focus my research on the silhouettes of sculptures representing travellers and explorers […]. Map No.5 symbolizes an intimate and solitary journey: in this case, the map is a skin tattoo testifying to individual experiences, an indelible archaic and yet modern mark […]. My maps describe experiences, no longer my experiences, of imaginary travels, and act as substitutes for travel journals.”

Andrea Melloni specialized in drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, and has been living and working in Berlin since 2002. In his work, he experiments a variety of media, including electronic music, video, installation, and photography. Besides being a visual artist, Melloni also masters Bonsai techniques. The Japanese word mitate means “to see in a new way” and is pertinent to many ambits of Japanese culture, including landscape architecture and garden design: in these disciplines the word defines a recovery and a new combination of pre-existing elements with an artistic purpose. Mitate Mono is part of a series of works produced in 2013: with its explosion of color, at a first glance, this work might recall the aesthetics of Abstract-Expressionist painting. But Melloni’s works are in fact ready-mades: by ripping the pictorial surface off the canvas of pre-existing works, the artist reverses and reassembles its colors onto a new canvas, making the original picture illegible and exposing the interstices between the pigment and the canvas.

Alessandro Passaro lives and works in Mesagne, near Brindisi. In his works he employs paint and canvas, with powerful colors channeling a fierce, and somewhat liberating, violence. The canvas records different layers of meaning, reflecting the artist’s perception of reality’s many levels, with textured brushstrokes complemented by seemingly singular objects, delivering surreal results. Pausa Reiki is part of a series of works based on the symbols of Reiki, a therapeutic Japanese discipline theorizing meditation as a means to achieve the union of interior energy with that of the universe. The artist’s works seem to initiate viewers to this discipline, with symbolic allusions creating a temporary connection between the practitioner and the receiver—a connection channeling energy and transcending the physical collocation of the two subjects.

Interview on neuramagazine.com

Nicola Rotiroti studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Catanzaro and currently lives and works in Rome. His work reinterprets the tradition of figurative painting and his research is centered on water. The artist paints bodies that dive and sink into water, with a hyper-realistic description of light and transparencies and vaguely psychedelic effects. There is something indefinably disquieting in his obsessive attention for painstaking detail, but water is certainly an element integral to human life and source of life, from the fetus’ placenta inside a mother’s womb, to the regenerating power of rain. Water is also a place of mental alteration, a place capable of generating visions: water in fact disperses, deforms, discloses a sense of disquiet, and muffles sounds, immerging the body into silence and suspending man’s state of consciousness.

Andrea Salvino was born in Rome, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, and currently lives and works in Berlin. His work focuses on social and political issues, drawing inspiration from news and cinema, related in particular to the 1960s and ‘70s urban class struggle. Andrea Salvino’s pictorial sign is rigorous, controlled, and essential, echoing nineteenth century socially engaged painting, such as that of Italian Divisionism. Aurora is a small-size painting, with an intimate and melancholy atmosphere, depicting a man seen from behind beholding a full moon just before dawn. With this painting, Salvino seems to draw inspiration from the art of Caspar David Friedrich, describing a landscape pervaded by a profound sense of solitude and where man is face to face with nature.

Marta Sforni studied Architecture in Venice, attended the Milan Academy of Fine Arts, and today lives and works between Berlin and Venice. Inspired by the history of decoration, her research focuses on meandering and interlacing ornamental patterns. Embassy flower depicts a detail of one of the Murano chandeliers—a subject the artist is very fond of—hanging in the central hall of the Italian Embassy in Berlin and is part of a series of paintings deriving from the artist’s direct observation of these institutional spaces. This painting, part of a wider series, can be read as a homage to the Italian glass-making tradition, an art which finds its highest expression in Murano. By using Payne’s grey, a pigment employed in the eighteenth century to paint dark shades, Sforni delivers a suspended painting, made of light paint layerings, symbolically alluding to time and memory.

Matteo Tenardi is from Castelnuovo Garfagnana, a town near Lucca, and currently lives and works in Massa. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Carrara, attending Omar Galliani’s courses and graduating in Visual Arts. Tenardi describes his subjects with great realism and skill. His work focuses on the relation between the human being and space understood as an architectural notion as well as as a physical boundary and a limit to escape. Non sapendo che fare, prese il vento e poi si lasciò portare alla deriva describes an anonymous man wearing a black overcoat, mysteriously showing his back to the viewer. The painting seamlessly fits into the architectural space of the corridor where it is displayed, creating interesting interactions and new spatial hypothesis.

Born in Genoa, Luca Vitone has been living in Berlin since 2010. His work, based on contamination between art, geography, anthropology, music, literature, and sociology, investigates the relations between man and his environment, with particular focus on the anthropological experience within ever-changing environments subject to topological and cultural alterations. During the 1990s, Vitone began his research on monochrome. The canvas, understood as a limited space for creation, integrates dust and ashes, the “anti-pigments.” The project entitled Finestre (2004) is part of this line of work: seven large watercolor paintings on paper, painted with the dust collected from the Stecca degli Artigiani in Milan, a former factory at the time owned by the city, not far from the Garibaldi Train Station. By fixing an intrinsically ephemeral material like dust on paper, the artist records the memory of a place to hand it down to posterity.

Active since the mid-eighties, Catelani was born in Florence, and is now living and working in Berlin. His work offers a reflection on sculpture with an experimental exploration of its principles in relation to space, shape, and composition. During the nineties, Catelani began working with color, producing abstract meta-pictures, visualizing his interest for plastic relations, lines, and color. While his works of the Tipologie series, from the end of the eighties, appear as special frames endowed with a constructive quality, Reziario originates from a later phase of Catelani’s research focusing on structure and environment: Reziario is a lattice, a seemingly minimal grid surpassing a rigorous two-dimensionality to challenge the limit of the plane; a work that can be perceived as an abstraction of the plane that could ideally extend beyond the physical borders of the work, leading to further constructive possibilities. But Reziario is also the structure of a plane, a synthesis charged with perceptive elements and powerful meanings.

Giorgio Verzotti, “Tre note per Antonio Catelani,” in Antonio Catelani: Compresenze, Bologna: Edizioni d'Arte Renografica, 1992.

Graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, Loredana Di Lillo today lives and works in Milan. Her artistic production encompasses a variety of materials and media, such as drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. The object of her research is to express the artist’s thoughts on society, through references to historic memory and a disenchanted analysis of the human condition. Lettera “T” (Tyrant) is part of a work composed of six photographs that form the word “Tyrant.” Each photograph—which can be read independently of the others, as a single work—originates either from a collage, from a collection of different elements, or from re-photographed compositions, and is the outcome of her synesthesia experiences. With this work, the artist makes a silent but striking allusion to the violence of dictatorial regimes.

Ninni Donato lives and works in Reggio Calabria. Trauerarbeit War Theatre is a work the artist presented with Angela Pellicanò’s work in the Officina delle Zattere spaces at the 55th Venice Biennale. For this project, Donato used photographs of the American Aviation taken during World War II. Found on-line in a public United States archive, these photos capture the moment before a tragic occurrence, such as a plane crash, or a bomb being dropped on a sensitive target. The word Trauerarbeit in German means “grieving process” and it is to this process that Donato alludes with his digitally-manipulated photographs charged with aesthetic value by post-production interventions. The artists takes photographic documents produced by history, and displays them after having transformed them into aesthetic objects, creating a framework in which a single person’s drama becomes a human tragedy, a testimony to the horrors of war given new value through newfound aesthetic values.

www.ninnidonato.it

Graduated in Painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Alessandro Dal Pont today lives and works in Berlin. In 2002, he participated in the Fondazione Antonio Ratti Advanced Course in Visual Arts in Como, and since 2015, he has been co-director of the mezzaterra11 – flat gallery project space. Dal Pont’s mediums of choice are sculpture and installation, and in his work he establishes a strong connection with the two-dimensional and photographic images which he turns into an integral part of his installation works, even when they are not of an ephemeral nature or site-specific. Kreuzberg, however, differs from other Dal Pont’s works because it consists of just one single photograph: taken on a September morning, the image shows an apartment window in Berlin where the artist once lived. The title comes from the district where the photo was taken, which in turn takes its name from a hill surmounted by a cross. In this case, the artist’s installation is in his own home, already set, and all he must do is photograph it.

Marco Poloni is a Swiss-Italian artist living and working in Berlin. His research is based on different media, such as cinema, photography, installations, texts, and narrations. In the sixty-seven photographs of the Displacement Island series, Marco Poloni develops his personal narration of Lampedusa, an island of great contrasts. Lampedusa usually is a destination after a long journey: it is so for tourists who choose the island for their holidays, and also for Tunisian and Libyan refugees who usually land on the island during the winter, after a perilous dramatic journey. Poloni records the traces of these two antithetical groups of travellers by collecting his own photos, amateur photos, images extrapolated from tour operator catalogues, paper cuttings, and film stills. Marco Poloni’s work has a strong socio-political connotation: Lampedusa is Europe’s furthest southern outpost where Europe and Africa meet.

Favelli’s work originates from his personal history: his grandmother used to have a flat in via Guerrazzi, in Bologna, a flat that Favelli renovated himself, even choosing the furniture and the fixtures. It was that experience that originated his need to construct and reconstruct, an inclination that is an integral factor of his artistic experimentations which began in 1995. Most famous are his black glass mosaic-mirrors in gold painted frames: these are mirrors that do not reflect one’s image but that give voice to the beholder’s intimate feelings and imagination. The mirror thus becomes an archive of memory, able to recount the past to those who look in it. As Favelli states, “the black mirror, placed in a large frame, corresponds to what I see as an expression of beauty [. . .] the process is important just as much as the finished work. I display even the time of work, of play, of concentration, which is necessary for the making of this slightly shiny black domino.”

Sergio Risaliti and Sandra Solimano, Flavio Favelli. Prima sala d’aspetto, Exhibition catalog (Genoa, 6-29 May), Genoa: Neos Edizioni, 2006, p. 9.

This artistic duo, working together since 1991, is hard to categorize. Simeone Crispino and Stella Scala both studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples and currently live and work in Milan. Their works, encompassing visual arts, sculpture, video, and installation, intend to bewilder the viewer, recombining with subtle irony elements of realty to reveal the objects’ symbolic meaning and the rigidity of social conventions. In this respect, they are the ideal interpreters of the precarious and contradictory nature of our times. For Pierpaolo Pancotto, the first twenty years of Vedovamazzei’s production corresponds to the biological cycle of a human being, from birth to death. Wood and Wood—a kit of wooden boards to build a pen-drawn cross—is a playful allusion to this aspect, ironically alluding to art as a chance to escape death.

Pierpaolo Pancotto, Vedovamazzei par Stella Scala e Simeone Crispino, 2011.

Daniele Puppi studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, Bologna, and Rome, where he currently lives and works. His creations are conceived in relation to the space where they will be placed so as to modify the perception of the architectural elements therein. In the corridor of a public office, a rotary dial telephone starts to ring. An unaware viewer that picks up the receiver would not hear the words of a mysterious interlocutor, but only some sounds that, considering the location, would prove most inappropriate: the imitation of a howl, sobbing followed by a raspberry, a woman’s sighs during a private moment of pleasure. With London Calling the artist interferes with the way a space is perceived according to its function, in this case the space being the institutional offices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. Compared to previous works by Puppi focusing on the physical peculiarities of space, in London Calling the key issue is mental perception addressed by generating a strong sense of puzzlement in the viewers.

Text by Emanuele Riccomi.

Alterazioni Video is an artist collective founded in Milan in 2003, operating in New York, Berlin and Milan, and whose members (Paololuca Barbieri, Alberto Caffarelli, Andrea Masu, Giacomo Porfiri and Matteo Erenbourg) only meet to work on specific projects communicating via the web. Don Puke/Mama was right is a lenticular print part of the project gravitating around FRED, a Turbo Film produced by the collective in 2012. That of Turbo Film is a cinematographic genre invented by Alterazioni Video on which the group has been working over the last five years: designed to be launched on the web, a Turbo Film is produced according to the principles broken down in the Turbo Film manifesto, which states: no rules, no script, creative solutions defined by necessity, allowed technology only that at hand, and lastly, location is key. The film thus become a never-ending media, recounting the story of the actual shooting of the video, day after day, with the plot developing with an impetuous language and often following a circular pattern, many times interrupted and resumed.