Narrative Pieces
Baldo Diodato, Paula Doepfner, Felix Kiessling, Schirin Kretschmann, Cyrill Lachauer, Daniel Lergon, Vettor Pisani, David Prytz, Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld, Yorgos Stamkopoulos, Philip Topolovac
Galleria Mario Iannelli is pleased to present 'Narrative Pieces', an exhibition that explores artists' narratives through a selection of works that have been unique works and writings in space.
The exhibition continues the focus on the documentation of the gallery's activity after the recent presentations of the book “Work in Process II 2021-2023” and the exhibition “Spazio. Photoreportage by Roberto Apa and Laura Gianetti at the Mario Iannelli Gallery”.
In his works such as “Tabula rasa, again”, “When the Bridge Ends, the Satellite Begins”, and “Exocenter” David Prytz sets narratives that intertwine the dynamics of the cosmos with those of everyday life in installations that assemble raw materials animated by kinetic movements, molten minerals (“Dumb Alchemy”), geometric drawings (“Literal Geometry”), graphic works (“I try to be precise”, “I try to be precise, again”) and photography works in which the image is made up of moving frames. Other Prytz exposed works emphasise more directly on the language, such as the audio work “In a Minute a Thousand Years”, the audio work “Now, Diaspora” and his cycle of drawings in which geometric shapes become the “Protagonists”.
The actions and the manipulated technologies that Felix Kiessling presented at the gallery such as drilling through the earth at two opposite points of the globe (“Earth Piercing”), converged with a plumb line a submarine volcano (“Vavilov”), a graphite piece tied to the hand of a clock mechanism that continues to turn drawing traces on a piece of cardboard (“Zeitzeichnung”), the gallery lights that turn on every time a lighting strikes the earth (“Schmetterling”), all put to face natural and technological forces that are beyond our control. In this dizziness, the dissolution of cognitive balance is experienced in real-time through a “deconstruction” allowing us to perceive a broad connection between elements and phenomena.
Among Paula Doepfner's multimedia works are textual works on paper, reinforced glass objects, and installations in glass, ice, and organic matter with sound performances (“Next Time I See You”, 2018 “Half my soul belongs to you”, 2021, “Took me way down to that red hot land”, 2022). Her drawings, delineated in miniature script on fine Japanese paper, are based on sketches made while observing brain operations. These texts are drawn from medical documents on human rights and neuroscientific research, as well as philosophical and lyrical sources.
Philip Topolovac's archaeological finds of the present create models for desires screening that go beyond ideologies. In the search for border places, both in the cosmos and on the earth, he depicts the interior life of his subjects, such as the “Satellites", unused satellites dispersed like space junk, the "Bunkers" in which artefacts of daily life resurfaced from a past are exhibited buried by the war, the "Cork models", cork models of industrial ruins in which techno clubs arose, or of monuments (the “Braciere - Colosseo quadrato"), the resin casts of anonymous places ("Mapping") or the casts in plaster of satellites and religious statues (“Celestial Debris”).
Schirin Kretschmann and Baldo Diodato's research equally turns to a place as the origin for a narrative which makes its stylistic feature the physical and spatial dimension of the work that interacts with the public and its duration.
In the site-specific Schirin Kretschmann installations the shape of grease reacts on the walls (“Labor II”) until the painting is removed at their end (“Collecting loss”, “Labor/Wall”), we observe changes in the state of the work and, through them, changes in places.
Since the Seventies, Baldo Diodato has made work-performances that were born in the American avant-garde languages and were then compared with numerous other places trod individually and collectively (including 1974 Living Sculptures, Philadelphia, 2002 “Marcaurelio”, 2010 “Squares of Rome”, 2016 “You Are Here” 13 Squares of Rome).
The narrative element in Yorgos Stamkopoulos' painting is time; the image is the repository of sedimented and gestural traces that define the internal movement of the painting or involve the observer with space like in the environmental installation “Trajectory". The phenomenological fragmentation of his paintings is intended to give prominence to the user’s experience.
Daniel Lergon's paintings are potentials and visionary gestures, in the materials, light and sign in space, in the stratification and interference between surfaces (“Unter Grün", “Lines and Grids”).
His paintings in which he used mineral materials to deal with the optical phenomena of the cosmos are in line with this potentiality of narration.
In Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld's narratives, she connects macro and microbiological dimensions in a science-fiction surfacing the magical origin of science.
Memory is stored in body fluids, cleaning liquids, synthetic drugs, cow skins, linguine di seppia, human eyelashes, and drugs, to trace a new cosmology (“All you can feel”, “Universal Cleaner”, “Shamanistic Travel Equipment ”, “Snake Dance”, “Linguine Oracle”, “Score of Wishes”, “ASS”). The new language is also tested in open laboratories during the exhibitions.
In the same shamanic cosmology perspective of Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld finds place also the “wanderer” of Cyrill Lachauer.
His “narrative landscapes” call for a different reading of the landscape and borders notion within anthropological-aesthetic research on the Western society crisis, in particular the American one, observed in his extensive travels to the United States ("Full service. From Walker River to Wounded Knee", 2012-2014 and "The Adventures of a White Middle-Class Man. From Black Hawk to Mother Leafy Anderson", 2016/2017 exhibited in “When you smell the smoke on your skin, the fire’s long gone”, 2019). In his latest travels to the U.S., he investigates the figure of the wanderer understood as an ideal of resistance that makes these possible narratives outside of traditional forms of world-making.
His original narrative style cannot be defined in one category since it is a unique work in which photography, video, literature and sound converge in collaboration with musicians.
In the philosophic theatre of Vettor Pisani, the language is deconstructed through an image or performance alchemy in which the sacred and the profane encounter in the tragedy of Ego and Western society history.
His typical narrative that breathes together eternity and exile, madness and humorous play, is also found in his writing works (“Edipo Borderline”, “German Love Sinfonietta", "L’ano lunare di Lou Salomé”) and in his biographies which he used to overlap reality over fiction.
The “Vero Falso d’Autore” embodies the “seize”, an interpretation of the work of other artists in one's narrative, lies the authentic figure of Vettor Pisani's work since his debut in the Seventies with his first exhibition interpreting Marcel Duchamp’s esoteric work”.
Entering the gallery, Kiessling's light work engages with the space by interweaving the relationship between the outside world and the exhibition through the works of Prytz and Kretschmann.
The work “Schmetterling (Biest)” connects in real time to global lightning events and ideally merges through Kretschmann's work “Glass Work” into Prytz's photo-engraving. The latter seems to reproduce the light flickering effect and mirrors the process of the other's work so it consists of a fragment heliogravure of a photograph created by scrolling an entire photographic roll in a single image, the same procedure made by Kiessling that converges the “butterfly effect” in one point.
The exhibition narrative starts from Kretschmann’s glass sheet as a blank page, it mirrors the gallery space and a story happened there, by so, introducing the resonance of the works with each other.
They complement in the second room the written format, filled with very minute letters on thin transparent paper with Doepfner’s work “But where are you tonight, sweet Mary II” and with the narratives of the works that activate through a sort of alchemy of materials or concepts past experiences in new configurations in the present: an ideology surpassed in the work “Braciere-Colosseo Quadrato” by Topolovac, the bronze cast of the “Calco della Storia” by Diodato, the constellations of aspirin leaking from black holes in Schönfeld's photographic work, the phenomenological painting of both Lergon and Stamkopoulos, the landscape veiled by a smoke bomb in Lachauer's photography, closes Vettor Pisani's “Pietra Filosofale”, suspended in space, towards which all works resurface as an ideal circle, for the essentiality of the process and authoritativeness as well for the conceptual and philosophical connotation of their research aimed at questioning the present.
The narrative is a dialogue of the artist's works and thoughts with the surroundings, triggering an osmosis between life, art and their searched dimensions.
The distinct characteristic of this conceptual and narrative art is to identify the object in the making process, overcoming its traditional dichotomy of the object with the subject.
The artist and the viewer are involved in the same position, which devolves into a singular interpretation.
In conceptual art starting from the 1960s and 1970s, experimental practices with the written word gave rise to body performances according to the proportion word: page = action: reality (Mario Diacono, “Vito Acconci. Dal testo-azione al corpo come testo”, 1975).
In the traced path of the displayed works, this specific passage can be found in the work of Baldo Diodato, in the idea that it could be practicable and habitable ("Cubi Scomponibili", 1967) and realised by the viewer who walks in the "space-time" of the work (“Sculture Viventi”, 1974).
At the same time, in Italy in the Seventies conceptual art was pervaded with a critical and prophetic climate through artists such as Vettor Pisani and Gino De Dominicis (“Lo Scorrevole” by Vettor Pisani, “Gino De Dominicis vi guarda”, Documenta Kassel 1972 ).
Today, the contemporary conceptual research displayed in the exhibition, in their inter- and multi-disciplinary nature, develops the narrative element through a more integrated relationship between language, media and contexts that could convey complex themes into society.
Getting in touch with other languages - among these are those of science, anthropology, archaeology and philosophy - art involves the whole of human existence and its meaning in a relational sight.
To sum up, the overall exhibition narrative aims to highlight a perpetual new form of society languages that redefine the borders of representativeness through conceptual functioning, forging both the individual and the world.