By implementing a thoughtful practice that includes a plurality of procedures and languages, the Glaser/Kunz duo continues their investigation by focusing on reality and its oppositions, in an orbit that crosses visions and definitions, detailed views and inspirations of a poetic nature, mediating between echoes and readings of a corporeal, physical and at the same time elusive humanity.

In their best-known works – now classics of their career – they were concerned with reconstructing shreds of reality, borrowing furnishings and contexts from it, and using the potential of technology to further adhere to this purpose of theirs, which does not it was independent of an analytical look at the relationships that arise between human beings and the context in which they act. But the Swiss duo does not focus exclusively on the means of technology, both together warn that languages and techniques linked to tradition can also be borrowed from art in order to develop a plausible and coherent consideration. And in this sense, drawing takes on an absolute value, not only as a study and design preparation for the most demanding multimedia and installation works – as has often happened in their own path -, but as a process in its own right. And this is the case. The papers selected for this exhibition – belonging to the production of Glaser Kunz’s last years – reveal an inextricable tangle of signs clinging to the surface thanks to warm brushstrokes of bituminous black inks that become hopelessly tangled.

A mysterious gesture contrasts with the studied regularity of their research on the technological and multimedia front: the works on paper on display reveal an inevitable link with the issues that the duo addresses in their more complex installation works.

The same happens with the sculptures installed in another space of the gallery: jute bags placed with apparent randomness on the floor surface. They are worn out, tested by time, frayed in their very materiality, in fact they disperse part of the substance they contain: ink, precisely. This creates an underlying and subtle synergy with the drawings displayed in a nearby environment. The ink becomes a trace of an imaginary sign that unites different materials – drawing and jute – which belong to the same principle, that of sculpture. Ink is the trace of a writing on existence that develops through superimpositions of memories, through mental associations and through dysfunctions that tend to erase and reconstruct further fractions of reality. “What I have not drawn I have not seen”, said Goethe in his Journey to Italy. This reflection is paradigmatic for understanding the value that the sign painted with black ink on shreds of white paper takes on.

With simple materials, they activate demiurgic spaces; through light and incisive gestures, they connect two-dimensionality with three-dimensionality; the space of representation and vision with that of exploration. Without severity, but through the rhythm of soft and tactile vision that contrasts forms and associates them with contents.

Critical text: #Lorenzomadaro