NanniBALESTRINI
Nanni Balestrini. Dominating the Visible
04.2014–05.2014
Nanni Balestrini. Dominating the Visible
04.2014–05.2014
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Nanni Balestrini
Sono un vero comunista, 2014
U.V. inkjet printing on canvas
44 x 36 cm
Sono un vero comunista, 2014
U.V. inkjet printing on canvas
44 x 36 cm
Press Release
Nanni Balestrini
Dominating the Visible
Opening: April 15, 2014
April 16 – May 31, 2014
Dominating the Visible
Opening: April 15, 2014
April 16 – May 31, 2014
The Marconi Foundation is pleased to present an exhibition of works created by the artist, poet and novelist Nanni Balestrini: two nuclei of his recent works, both of which new and carried out for this occasion.
Indefatigable promoter of Gruppo 63, to which last Autumn the Marconi Foundation dedicated a retrospective exhibition, Nanni Balestrini is a versatile and complex personality whose work places itself on the boundaries of manifold languages.
From among the five most noteworthy poets of I Novissimi, the artist and writer stands out due to his uninterrupted experimentalism, his development of techniques referable to the collage, together with his extensive intuition regarding the effect and influence of chance in poetic practice.
The exhibition will be divided into two distinct and parallel sections which are, however, clearly bound to each other: like two possible – and in some way complementary – declensions that his work proposes in order to give rise to a complex intervention with the universe of the “visible”, understood as the place of our total meeting with the world by means of its potentially infinite configurations of concrete existence.
The first floor will host the cycle entitled The Masters of Colour which in a new key again proposes the reproductions of famous paintings: great icons of the history of art painted by Paolo Uccello, Fernand Léger, Paolo Veronese, Eugène Delacroix, El Greco and Pieter Paul Rubens on which Balestrini has added textual cut-out segments, freely removed from forms of contemporary media communication, almost as if wanting to “measure” the language on the image, and vice versa.
This is an extraordinary cycle in which the “history” of the images was confronted and contrasted in real time, in a felicitous and active interference with the “event” of the word as mirror of social, political – and in an even broader sense – of human becoming.
As its prototype the work has a series of collages dating from the Sixties based on images taken from the historical-artistic collection of The Masters of Colour, a series of volumes published by the Fratelli Fabbri publishing house which Balestrini decided to transpose on canvas keeping the sizes of the original paintings. In this way the artist has created a large gallery, at the same time virtual and physical, emblematic of his intermedial practice that is constantly solved in a concrete sense and which takes its impetus from the “need to dominate the visible” (an expression that we find in one of the poetic texts dedicated by the author to this cycle of works).
Indefatigable promoter of Gruppo 63, to which last Autumn the Marconi Foundation dedicated a retrospective exhibition, Nanni Balestrini is a versatile and complex personality whose work places itself on the boundaries of manifold languages.
From among the five most noteworthy poets of I Novissimi, the artist and writer stands out due to his uninterrupted experimentalism, his development of techniques referable to the collage, together with his extensive intuition regarding the effect and influence of chance in poetic practice.
The exhibition will be divided into two distinct and parallel sections which are, however, clearly bound to each other: like two possible – and in some way complementary – declensions that his work proposes in order to give rise to a complex intervention with the universe of the “visible”, understood as the place of our total meeting with the world by means of its potentially infinite configurations of concrete existence.
The first floor will host the cycle entitled The Masters of Colour which in a new key again proposes the reproductions of famous paintings: great icons of the history of art painted by Paolo Uccello, Fernand Léger, Paolo Veronese, Eugène Delacroix, El Greco and Pieter Paul Rubens on which Balestrini has added textual cut-out segments, freely removed from forms of contemporary media communication, almost as if wanting to “measure” the language on the image, and vice versa.
This is an extraordinary cycle in which the “history” of the images was confronted and contrasted in real time, in a felicitous and active interference with the “event” of the word as mirror of social, political – and in an even broader sense – of human becoming.
As its prototype the work has a series of collages dating from the Sixties based on images taken from the historical-artistic collection of The Masters of Colour, a series of volumes published by the Fratelli Fabbri publishing house which Balestrini decided to transpose on canvas keeping the sizes of the original paintings. In this way the artist has created a large gallery, at the same time virtual and physical, emblematic of his intermedial practice that is constantly solved in a concrete sense and which takes its impetus from the “need to dominate the visible” (an expression that we find in one of the poetic texts dedicated by the author to this cycle of works).
What “dominates the visible” as the place of possibility of being of – and in – the world, by way of creativity as the exercise of freedom, is printed language which filters the image, the tangible projection of an ideal place. Or, to put it better, its visual-communicative transposition by means of the reproduction: the imagined museum that is mediated by the artist’s modifying intervention (the “strings” of words-in-freedom).
At the second floor, instead, another cycle of Balestrini’s recent production, created last year will be on exhibit for the first time.
The cycle is entitled Blacks. These are works in which the artist visually reformulates one of the fundamental concepts of his artistic poetics on all levels: that of “destruction”.
Once again using the collage technique, these works extract and recombine deconstructed fragments of present-day media communication according to interwoven and intermittent trajectories.
However, these “verbal passages” are then partially cancelled and “dominated” by the superimposed presence of large black marks or spots that are intentionally free and incisive, in such a way as to render their semantic content and significance more problematic.
Citing one of the phrases we can read here, one can say that they consequently tend towards the “reproduction of the possible”.
The Blacks will be accompanied by a sound environment also created by Balestrini for the occasion in which a number of voices pronounce disconnected fragments of words in a sort of hearing “impasto”, in a total and immersive sense amplifying the idea of significant destruction that underlies the same paintings.
What emerges is a complex emotive-linguistic territory which is supported by an expressive equilibrium that is subtly dynamic and “magmatically” evocative.
Differing from The Masters of Colour, however, this is no longer based on the interferential recognisability of the various elements – the letter and the image, but also the explicit cut-up technique which materially induces their creative relation – but on their intentional massing and fragmenting of a new concrete syntax whose aim is both to intuit and translate the communicative collapse that connotes our hypermedia age into new possible “places” of relation.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of the Quaderno della Fondazione no. 13 including a text by Francesca Pola, illustrations of the works on exhibit and a poetic piece by the artist.
At the second floor, instead, another cycle of Balestrini’s recent production, created last year will be on exhibit for the first time.
The cycle is entitled Blacks. These are works in which the artist visually reformulates one of the fundamental concepts of his artistic poetics on all levels: that of “destruction”.
Once again using the collage technique, these works extract and recombine deconstructed fragments of present-day media communication according to interwoven and intermittent trajectories.
However, these “verbal passages” are then partially cancelled and “dominated” by the superimposed presence of large black marks or spots that are intentionally free and incisive, in such a way as to render their semantic content and significance more problematic.
Citing one of the phrases we can read here, one can say that they consequently tend towards the “reproduction of the possible”.
The Blacks will be accompanied by a sound environment also created by Balestrini for the occasion in which a number of voices pronounce disconnected fragments of words in a sort of hearing “impasto”, in a total and immersive sense amplifying the idea of significant destruction that underlies the same paintings.
What emerges is a complex emotive-linguistic territory which is supported by an expressive equilibrium that is subtly dynamic and “magmatically” evocative.
Differing from The Masters of Colour, however, this is no longer based on the interferential recognisability of the various elements – the letter and the image, but also the explicit cut-up technique which materially induces their creative relation – but on their intentional massing and fragmenting of a new concrete syntax whose aim is both to intuit and translate the communicative collapse that connotes our hypermedia age into new possible “places” of relation.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of the Quaderno della Fondazione no. 13 including a text by Francesca Pola, illustrations of the works on exhibit and a poetic piece by the artist.