The artists involved all held a personal exhibition in the Roman gallery except Topolovac who will inaugurate his in September and Stamkopoulos in December. This group show offers the artist/spectator the opportunity to verify concretely the dialectical similarities that would otherwise have remained only on an intuitive level. The video ‘Now (Diaspora)’ by David Prytz, where words formed on the screen are then erased and replaced by others in an “authorial” and not only temporal loop, influences and is influenced by the proximity of other works of art dealing with the same theme but in different ways. For example the presence of the painting on Jeans canvas by Claus Philip Lehmann, depicting a suspended cylinder in white paint, immediately places as the central theme the ‘Magrittean’ legacy of collapse between the object and its nominalization, which we saw in the course of the last century. Philip Topolovac’s artwork seems to arise from the same awareness, the model to scale of the Berghain, a famous Berlin hang-out, whose name derives from a mix of the names of two neighbourhoods, Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, as it is located between the two. The choice of constructing it with cork visibly transforms the architectural element into a sculptural object, with the capacity to make us reflect upon why today we speak of “archeology of the present” and whether we can speak about baroque inflection for modernism too. These same thoughts emerge from Yorgos Stamkopoulos’ paintings, both informal and geometric, thus moving the focus upon the creative process, which forces two pictorial surfaces to coexist on the same support, evoking the technique of the detachment of frescoes, or the decomposition in time of historical buildings’ facades. The peculiar aspect of this curatorial project is that the coral and ‘workshop like’ dimension, established through an intense dialogue between autonomous pieces, does not limit but rather amplifies the fruition of the specific “method of research somewhat scientific and undepictable” adopted by the single artists of the exhibition. Moreover, the ascertainment that the user’s response time to the world of globalized information has become null is not for them the arrival point but rather the starting point for asking oneself what society could mean today by “direct experience”. Their answer seems to be that in a “dematerialized” world where we are dominated by the “expanded present” the only way to create a real gesture in a radical way is to create artwork that is not site specific but “time specific”. That is, images that are like clots of different time-frames – introjecting a performative dimension into the constitutive process of the artwork itself – to open up innovative reflections and visualizations about what it means today to “perceive the surroundings” from a specific instant. These considerations are naturally dealt with by these artists keeping in mind the present passage from the analogic to the digital system. For this reason the sixteen unreleased artworks shown at the exhibition, apart from the ones we mentioned, range from the machine ‘Clock running’ by Felix Kiessling, measuring the duration of the exhibition by using a piece of graphite that repeatedly draws a circle onto a wooden base, to the Snake dance installation by Sarah Schönfeld where a snake skin is animated by a blowing vacuum cleaner whose tube crosses over, connecting/breaking through two of the gallery’s walls. These are “presences” arising from the awareness that today we are dealing with a virtualized fruition and therefore the assessment tools must be thought again or recalibrated when they are tried out. The photographic image ‘Asset Management’ by Joe Clark expresses all of this with extreme delicacy, as it consists of a synthetic surface lit with the technique used for rendering in the virtual space of computer graphics, producing fluttering sheets frozen in a pause that evokes a wider narrative filmic transformation. Whereas ‘Je suis Esam’ by Tom Esam, a silk surface placed on a window area facing outside on which a black and white image of a crowd of demonstrators takes on parade the artist’s name highlighted in red, is an implosion of those advertising and marketing techniques that in the last decades have been applied to the progressive “aesthetization of the political body” and the “community’s emotional participation”. The analytical propositive approach, found in all of the above mentioned artworks, leads these artists on the one hand to a reflection upon the “pictorial”, irrespective of the picture object, hence on analizing in a critical way the concept of art history according to Western tradition. On the other hand they find themselves having to verify and put to test scientific and social intuitions acquired in the course of the past century, in order to form a new “common sense”. The final goal of these intimate and delicate gestures of theirs seems to be to ask oneself what may or should be the artist’s role in the era that is being defined as “post internet”, or rather, art’s real capacity to affect the present world.

The artists included in the exhibition ‘Anatomy of Restlessness (Anatomia dell’irrequietezza)’ are of a generation that matured at the time when the web went from being a democratic possibility of exchanging “official political” information to the use of Apps for entertainment of free time/ work time, or for the “imposition” of data that previously would have been considered exquitively personal. This time of passage, as far as the cultural debate is concerned, has produced an ambiguous demand to return to reality. From the philosophy convention in Cologne in 2011 to the article published in March 2016 on e-Flux by Boris Groyes it seems as if the central focus has become what could be meant by concreteness of reality and truth of the artistic gesture in a world where post-production has become common practice (from Instagram to Wikipedia, from Airbnb to tv series on streaming). This “concretized virtuality” is the conceptual, pragmatic and social future which has been strongly introjected and to which these artists are reacting by creating pieces of art which are like procedural systems conceived to be shared and rediscussed. The unconscious motive that drives them is to understand what could be, in this day and age, the correct outlook on “things/information” and taking on and instilling responsibility for a correct transmission of data and knowledge. For this reason their pieces reveal a quest for balance, on the edge of the impossible, with contradictory materials, amongst natural and artificial elements. Using as primary material a digital one is like placing the practice of collage or of “ready made” into the world of electronic algorithms. So we are facing a new idea of assembly, moving away from the tradition of avant-garde, because the elements it associates are extracted from the virtual reality we are all immersed in today. The method of creating a piece that doesn’t represent an image of reality but rather the mechanism that provokes the epiphanic event live is an open pathway between the previous generation and them, from Mario Airò to Carsten Höller, from Olafur Eliasson to Cai Guo-Qiang, all the way to Thomas Demand. But, as opposed to these predecessors, they act in an “introjective” dimension because it is clear for them that the common idea according to which everything has already been discovered and everything is just one click away, has fallen through. The great novelty they propose however does not reside in this ascertainment, but in the fact that the assembly is not a means for them, but the subject of the artwork. In this way the analysis of the artwork’s surface coincides with that of the object represented and vice versa, thus practicing a third path, not reflected in the tradition of figurative art or of abstraction. This aesthetic/conceptual attitude of theirs wants to cause a short circuit in the spectator’s perception, aimed at increasing his/her level of attention towards the cognitive processes used on a daily basis to communicate with the world.