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24/4/2003

Piero Addis

Boston Yacht Club, Boston

Showcase. 15 videos and canvases by the Italian artist of the last two years

Opening: April 25th from 5.00 to 9.00 pm
From monday to friday until May 15th

Curator: D.C. Berk
Text by Eleonora Fiorani


Enchantments and wanderings
By Eleonora Fiorani

How to pause the sprained glance that skims the surface of things and never dwell upon them? How to obviate to the setback and to the emptying of sense that occurs when the flow communication bursts into the scene and invests the bright fullness of the work? Invests its dark introverted world, until the risk to make it a mass-medial hybrid, which it spreads in space and becomes a show, assuming the temporality of the event and depriving itself of sense? How to make sense of the indistinct flow of events, of perceptions, or of images?
Not really restoring the frame - already broken by the Avantgardes - that the work declares itself and returns to being alive. Nor is possible, after the Avangardes, the concept of a work of art that assumes the shape of a picture, closed in itself, within space and time that are absolute.
But there are many ways to break the frame of an artwork and its self-reference to re-endow it with meaning, finding its vision. Addis makes it with a straight intervention on the living body of the work and playing with the language, the languages indeed, to provoke the confluence of them, their collision, their shrieking. He invents courses of images and words that assume the figure of a "rebus", the way to say with images or things like in the past in the technique of theatre of the memory, like "tableaux vivants".

The rebuses, as a result of one year’s work (began in June 2002, date of the first video-rebus shot in Basel) starts after the observation of reality: rarely they are thought before. In this work, events and daily slices of life, but also unexpected combinations (two back figures, a moon landscape, a pie crossed by an X) just adding some simple letters they become holders of a meaning which is "else.”
The letters, which suddenly appear in the videos, to dissolve mysteriously in the same way, are traces that bring us behind the rebuses and its enigmas, to interrogate the silence of the image.
The little numeral of the rebus becomes a figure surplus: the images overflow and the letters of the language fluctuate on the surface without thickness.

On the density of the image, on its completeness, on its enigma the letters inscribe meanings "else", but they are mislaid writings, like a sort of wanderer looking for anchorage or a place. But exactly here, in this swerve, in its emptiness emerges the "sense". And because the making of sense doesn't allow endurances, it produces chasms, black holes, and sublime absences. It produces a silence that cannot be shattered, nor can be healed; and it compels us to dwell upon the image and to drift ourselves on its surface.
An arm that raises and mechanically repeats the salute/goodbye gesture, through the shrieking of its unnaturalness, makes the melodrama struggles slight like a smile. The laughter, in fact, as Bergson well did know, starts on getting jammed in the movement or the sense, apart from the more remote cause of aesthetic creation and the rise of the desire.
And therefore Addis assumes the aesthetic look that perceives the world alive: through this look everything breathes, has a soul and looks at us, so that the world appears like an everlasting object of enchantment. Through this look the noticeable world exists in its colors, sounds, smells. And it exists in everything because all is inhabited by gods.
Therefore these situations, daily visible, can introduce us to other realities, more imaginative or virtual; often more fascinating and more interesting than the first. In the rebuses there are two levels of reality: the first one is evident; the other is symbolic; all together they become one causing an effect of estranging, of astonishment. Moreover, to know means to combine the sensible with the mind; it is a free game of faculties where the "sinaesthesias" become concepts and vice versa the concepts become visible, become true experiences, emotions. So what happens is that "nonsense", proverbs, sentences interlace themselves like an interlude, a "divertissement".

The music is particularly relevant in the first of Addis' videos: Steps, cut on a tip tap music or "Stops in every station but Lezza" (presented here only on canvases, but edited also in a video cut on the Tambour du Bronx sound). Here the music takes a crucial place for the construction of the whole meaning. The rebuses introduce us to the slightness of the game, to the pure pleasure of playing. But it can also assume a de-structuring and estranging meaning. The logic of the contrast is predominant; a kind of dystonia: therefore the intensity of the music is approached to the slightness of the sense and nonsense, to create games or estranging and ludicrous correspondences among gestures and sound.
In the beautiful rebuses shot in two museums of Barcelona the rhythmicity of the sound produced by the skaters expands the space of circling and flying. Or that the voice saying a Wharhol text on the beauty, is like the voice over of the visitors watching a Miro picture where there is only a line.
The videos are pre-eminently multi-code experimentation, where the visual and linguistic goes together with the voices reciting or whispering and the true sound, present here in the most different expressions, from pop to classic, tribal, metropolitan, melodrama and opera too.
The music always introduces us to a mythic space: introduces the time that the image has not, and makes us able to taste pains and unknown tears and unimaginable joys. The music gives to the image a soul. Halos, ironies, longings, joy of life and all sound iridescence affect the images. But a dissonance, an overturning of sense could also occur. The fascination resides in the swerve, in the unexpected.

Tip tap, tip tap, tip tip tap, steps spied under a grating of the subway, subtracted to the unexhausted fluxes, paused in the silence of the instant by the photography -in the video- dance and sing frantically. They are returned to the "lived" world, but contemporarily are made artificial (with irony) by the rhythm of a musical from the Fifties.
If the silence of the image evokes the places of anonymity, of the passage without face of the multitude, the video contaminates the languages and it catches other meanings of the evocative power of the image. It transforms the tragic into the ludicrous, the anonymous movement into cut sounds, as the proper rhythm of the city, into a nonsense, into the pure frenzied pleasure of going dancing. It is also a passionate and unenchanted quotation of the American musical and movie strategies. The magic of the city is caught in the little daily things on which our attention never stops. To let see means to see with different eyes. This is also the meaning of the transposition of the images into canvases (oil and digital print). The painting de-frame the picture, exhibits the handily intervening grinding of the edges and gets into a Caravagesque aura. There is a sort of submissive chastity in the wise use of the color, endowing shadows, rarefied tonalities and their balance.
Therefore the wise use of the vision and image technologies is submitted by Addis. In fact he wants to find again the innocence of a gaze that is able to see sunshine in the most humble aspects and the most insignificant events. While he directs our attention to the deception of languages, he escapes from the spectacularity of the image.
From here derives the choice of a minimalist language: in the images, colors, gestures. Addis whispers, not declaims. He's searching the meaning surplus, the enchanting in the slightness and the yoke, in the pleasure of nonsense: life is a tip tap, tippetetap, at the end.

Also us, as we consider art a cognitive expression which re-gives us an emotional and mental whole through rhythm-sound-vision, when we see Addis' work we are surprised: we know that after the severe Ninehundred we have been deflated by the nonsense, the technology, the uncertainty. Now the use of the rebuses, the alphabetic-significant bearing (never compulsory), comfort us in our emptiness and leave us free to enjoy the visual and pictorial valences with their emotion and secret experience.


The Boston Yacht Club
Marblehead, One Front Street
Boston, MA 01945
(781) 631-3100

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