Dario Robleto
dal 7/12/2004 al 29/1/2005
Segnalato da
7/12/2004
Dario Robleto
Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier
Diary of a Resurrector is a set of sculptures and objects made entirely by the artist's own hand, using an amazing array of salvaged and recast materials. The initial questioning behind the production of these works is a fiction: Robleto imagined the (hi)story of an American soldier who has lived through all his country's wars since Independence, suffering all the violence of the succession of battles in which his body was involved.
Diary of a resurrector
Opening 6pm
Dario Robleto's Diary of a Resurrector is a set of sculptures and objects made entirely by the artist's own hand, using an amazing array of salvaged and recast materials.
The initial questioning behind the production of these works is a fiction: Robleto imagined the (hi)story of an American soldier who has lived through all his country's wars since Independence, suffering all the violence of the succession of battles in which his body was involved. From this voided body, destroyed by so much combat (upon the motivations and justifications for which, good and bad alike, there is absolutely no point in dwelling, from his own viewpoint), the artist has endeavoured, in four years of work, to posit the challenge of "resurrection".
How is it possible not only to heal a body if it is wounded, but also to recreate and remake it, if the cumulative time of battles has obliterated everything that formed its own identity, and led it to undifferentiatedness and chaos? The "resurrector" represented by the artist, a chemist by training, thus makes unlikely potions, manufactures from a thousand and one unbelievable materials the phials that contain them, as well as a violin and its music, a medicine table and all its instruments, a leech jar, a cupboard full of prostheses and souvenirs, the length of plank to which our soldier clung more than once, a poem...
So the sculpture titled Don't Identify With My Shadow Anymore is made up of: "cast and carved dehydrated bone calcium, bone charcoal, bone dust from every bone in the body, sulfur, wool pulled and respooled from Americain combat casualty blankets from various wars, melted bullet lead, fool’s gold, nickel, white oak, water extendable resin".
For the instruments of this resurrection must themselves be comprehensive re-creations, permitting the thought of an identical compensation of the men who were contemporaries (and who was not the contemporary of a violin or an elixir of youthfulness?).
Robleto's art does not cling to the chronicle of a death foretold, to the passive objection to ongoing war, to the melancholy of time passing: against the grain of all the makeshift jobs which form our disenchanted and death-dealing modernity, it aims at reforming the very body of things and beings that History reduces to smithereens, he restores appearance and constitution to things tending to dispersal, and a new meaning to what was already no more than background and dust.
And the revolt that drives him would, in all modesty (for it cannot be seen, and for good reason!), be Essential Medicine, panacea, a living mimesis at the heart of reality. Repairing Symbolism which it is never too late to make good use of.
Emmanuel Latreille
Frac Languedoc-Roussillon
4 rue Rambaud F34000 Montpellier