Mario Sala
dal 12/4/2002 al 6/7/2002
Segnalato da
12/4/2002
Mario Sala
ArsFutura Galerie, Zurich
With his new installation, consisting of three pictures and two objects, he depicts the exciting story of a married couple on a journey. The setting is a hotel lobby (2002) in Capetown. Having been robbed twice within the last twelve hours, Alan und Glanys Jennings are sitting exhausted but confident in a corner. The atmosphere is explosive...
We are delighted to present Mario Sala (born in 1965 and
living in Winterthur) for the first time in the Gallery
arsFutura programme.
With his new installation, consisting of three pictures
and two objects, he depicts the exciting story of a
married couple on a journey.
The setting is a hotel lobby (2002) in Capetown. Having
been robbed twice within the last twelve hours, Alan und
Glanys Jennings are sitting exhausted but confident in a
corner. The atmosphere is explosive. Tension and the risk
of a further disaster is high...!
Sala heightens the incident by means of presenting the
possible events in a fictitious story. Starting with a
picture of the couple from a South African newspaper, he
adds strands to a story that entices the viewers
imagination to undertake a journey which will challenge
their astute senses of detection. How did this incident
come about? Is they prefer holidays by train and electric
rasor (2002) a key to understanding, or rather a
description of the couples character? What does the Room
cleaning service (2002) have to do with the case? Is the
cleaning woman (2002) a witness or a culprit? And how is
their son (called superrun) (2002) involved in the
matter?
The individual scenes show common clues as regards the
nature of both content and form, imply a logical course
of events, comparable with a narrative structure, but in
the circumstances also come to nothing. Sala does not
relate a complete story, although the surroundings could
very well be borrowed from reality. Rather, he depicts
subtle space and events in detail that seems to turn a
kind of parallel world into daily reality.
His depiction of reality takes place on photographic,
painting and installation levels. Sala combines many
varied patterns, he overlays colour and material layers
and thereby allows the emergence of a tight net of subtle
allusions and clues. This questioning of pictures is
similar to investigating the claim to reality of ordinary
visual materials. The continual reinvention of grotesque
stories, extracted from anecdotes and unprepossessing
press releases, just as much as their complex conversion,
is characteristic of Salas universe; a universe which
can just as well be populated by popular icons such as
extreme sports athletes and romantic wild-west images.
ARSFUTURA GALLERY, Bleicherweg 45, CH-8002 Zürich
Tel. +41 1 201 88 10 Fax +41 1 201 88 11