Gagliardi e Domke Contemporary

Gagliardi e Domke proudly announces:
#FabioViale – La Suprema
@Kunst&Denker Duesseldorf

20.01.2017 – 30.04.2017

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Kunst & Denker Contemporary presents a duo-show with Laurenz Berges (*1966; Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf, Frankfurt/ Berlin) und Fabio Viale (*1975; Galerie Gagliardi e Domke, Turin).

History and glorification are two sides of the same coin. Longing for the old times, romanticising about what is gone, is both a habit of today and of the past. The Greek-romanic antique developed the idyll genre in literature and art, commonly taking place in „Arcadia“; an allegory of a golden era in the past. But the construction of Arcadia was preceded by an act of destruction: According to mythology, Jupiter created the Arcadian landscape from the half of the Earth that Helio´s son was responsible for: a half which he had burned. The impermanence thus imbued with the idylls surrounds an ambivalence of innocence and decay. As is written in Goethe’s Faust, ” For all that is constructed – the same is worth to be destructed,” Schiller also includes the insight of the impossibility of returning to Arcadia. Instead, he dreams of a future Elysium.
It is precisely this impossibility that can be found in the photographs of Laurenz Berges. Berges’ interest in the perisphere, the urban and social emptiness, lends his work an aura of a post-apocalyptic anti-idyll. The works in the exhibition were created in various cities and villages from 2005 to 2009, depicting motifs of borders and transition, of the view in and out, and of silent interiors where the proliferating nature seems to be the last living creature. Walls with imprints of picture frames, which have hung there, show something that once was, while being unable to tell a story; all that remains are vague traces. Berges calls for a timelessness in his work, which is reflected in the absence of people and objects that could be dated all too specifically. But this supra-temporality inevitably is preceded by history, which remains sealed to us. The social life in the buildings remains fiction, and like the ancient poets, Berges construed his own idyll to ponder their loss, without taking a judgemental attitude . His photographic manner focuses on aestheticized retreats, which no longer exist.
The temporal shift is complemented by Fabio Viale´s sculptures. Whereas he previously produced everyday objects such as car tires, paper planes or styrofoam plates, sometimes appropriately dyed and scented, to question the meaning and usefulness of the materials, he now takes a step back into antiquity. He creates sculptures, refering tohistorical sculptures and tattooing them with a special technique, inspired by motifs of Russian prisoners or Japanese body tattoos – still present in the ‘culture’ of Yakuza. The idealism of the antique is opposed to the desire for an individual presentation, presented in the tattoos as complex pictorial programs. They play with the act of transfering history and its change of meaning in the course of their consumption. Just like in Berge’s photos, any form of style loses its temporality in Viale´s marble sculptures.

Copyright: Kunst und Denker Contemporay

Exhibition views: Celine Al-Mosawi