3/4/2013
Manuela Corti
No Format, London
The sixth opera. The space becomes a geometric concept in all its fullness even when it comes to display and justify the 'gifts' or when photographs speak of other exhibitions, from other historical periods, rebuilt and bundled into a single worktop.
Manuela Corti joined the New Geo movement in the early 90s. Her necessity to join the movement, arises from the need to find a “temporary” grammar, an area determined by the story of the pictorial space and by the time looming on the three-dimensional and that of two dimensions. In few words, actually in a thought, the necessity arises from the desire that the time flows only in the artwork before then in its concept. At first, there are the lines and the colours, on materials different from the canvas, then the lines evolve, they “dig in” the materials: the lines become furrows, or they size down to the level of the worktop and as a consequence of that the sheet roughens up, it shrivels. Furthermore the strings used to hang the artwork interact with the opera itself, becoming an integral part of its concept, not only functional. The space becomes a geometric concept in all its fullness even when it comes to display and justify the 'gifts' or when photographs speak of other exhibitions, from other historical periods, rebuilt and bundled into a single worktop. The 'sixth opera' is the result of the other 5 artworks on display and it is part of the thought that I have just explained. The arrangement of the elements is even literary and literal.
The grooves, the ropes and the wrinkled worktops are like the words, the thoughts of a great book where they are all recognizable, they coexist, but not always is understandable the meaning or the extension of it. So the 'sixth opera' is a literal transposition, a grammar elision and also a study of the mathematical functions of time and space. Wanting to look deeply into it, it s a game too, a game for theoreticians, a deepening into of the space from white to black. Within this space, or composition and also taking advantage of it, the work 'Fashion Forgery' takes shape and it comes from the contribution: a print for fashion, that Manuela has created for the designer Carlotta Actis Barone, designing her AW 2013-14 collection prints. In this artwork, the configuration comes from the game for children and adults called “cat's cradle”. This string game is well know and so are the various configurations that the game can take, all built around the intermingling configurations that 4 + 4 fingers can give from a tide piece of string, and why not also from a circle. Because after all it is always a circle, pulled, knotted, braided, overlapping, all with a limit given by the fingers and the appropriate configuration of the moment. But we are still talking about a grammar; still we are talking of a text, where the elisions appear even if they are overlapped. So the 'sixth opera', which at first will be missing from the exhibition hall and will appear in an empty space, it is actually already present in the works on display. The audience will have the time and disposition, if they want, to configure it, starting from the elements of the works on display. The sixth opera will eventually be exposed, the following week, as a new parameter to add to the infinite book of space
Opening night preview, Thursday 4th April, 5-9 pm
No Format
Harrington Way, off Warspite Road (Second Floor Studios & Arts) - London
Opening time: 11am-5pm