17/3/2009
Luca Bertolo
Arcade, London
The Domain of Painting. Through his appropriation of the communicative fashion supplement or art journal advert, artist creates his own auto-referential Universe, which cannot be reduced to formalism or mere informational conceptualism. Here is an example of painting as a mode of construction and production of subjectivity, a heterogenetic practice in which subjectivity is a further augmentation to the painter's polychromatic palette.
Arcade presents the first UK solo exhibition by Italian artist Luca Bertolo
If we take culture as the most ‘frivolous and serious’ of activities, we can see how Luca Bertolo’s most
recent experimental and playful work might fit into this schema. Through his appropriation of the
communicative fashion supplement or art journal advert – which he uses as a substrate to re-inscribe
with his singular painterly subjectivity – he creates his own auto-referential Universe, which cannot
be reduced to formalism or mere informational conceptualism. Here is an example of painting as
a mode of construction and production of subjectivity, a heterogenetic practice in which subjectivity
is a further augmentation to the painter’s polychromatic palette.
Art occupies a privileged position in contemporary capitalist society. This unique self-positioning can
be traced back in the Renaissance when artists first began to express their own subjectivities. Art was
able to detach itself from the specific axioms that governed society and consequently, art now heralds
a novel ethical and aesthetic paradigm of previously unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being. It
performs this through processes of emergent potential and techniques of experimental creativity. It ruptures
and sutures reality with the materials it finds present-at-hand, utilising all of the plastic arts to mobilise
the vectors of sensation in order to offer resistance to capitalism’s over coding regimes of communication.
Accordingly, art is a laboratory for the crystallisation of mutant subjectivities, painterly or otherwise.
Art, in the institutional sense is fully integrated and complicit with capitalism, yet the productive and
constructive qualities of art still privilege and engender the radically new. This resingularisation is counter
to the totalising and subsuming continuum we inhabit, a system that only produces for production’s sake.
As an inheritor of Duchamp’s readymade, Bertolo goes beyond the merely informational re-presentation
of the commodity, overflowing the discursive and linguistic boundaries that Duchamp intended, in which
the readymade is circumscribed as capitalist signifier.
And whilst Bertolo still has formal and conceptual
concerns, his work cannot be reduced to bald concept or simple commodity alone; it constructs anti-
materialist existential territories via the affective register. This surpasses the discursive artistic games of
the informational readymade and speaks of something more implicitly political and democratic that
teeters on the anarchic. Subsequently, meaning actively multiplies in the work – it swarms in the manner
of poetics. The work becomes a ‘movable host of metaphors’, an irreducible mobile cusp that more
adequately models the chaos of our reality. By this operation it delimits itself from capitalist purview and
invents its own unique domain.
Luca Bertolo (1968, IT) graduated from the Accademia di Brera, Milano in 1998. His work is featured
in the touring survey show Italian Genius Now and will feature in the forthcoming Prague Biennale.
The Domain of Painting, a 76 page, full colour publication will accompany the exhibition, with texts
by Ilsa Colsell, Davide Ferri, Paul Goodwin, Simone Menegoi and Chris Sharp. Published by Arcade
in association with Galleria Spazio A, Pistoia and the artist Luca Bertolo.
Private View Wednesday March 18, 18-20
Arcade
87 Lever Street - London
thursday - saturday 12-18 and by appointment
free admission