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13/7/2006

Loris Cecchini

Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai

After the solo exhibition in Continua Gallery, Beijing solo exhibition by the Italian artists Loris Cecchini entinled Cloudless will be presented in Shanghai Duolun MoMA

And will travle to Paris, Rome and New York. In the process the structure of the show will be modified and new elements added. More specifically, the plastic elements making up the installation will be sourced by the artist in the various cities and reworked for the subsequent ones, creating a continuum of infrastructural elements (the doors) which enter into direct relation with each other in terms of their significance as threshold, cultural artefact and symbolic element. The aim of the project is not just to bring Italian culture to the world but also to understand and absorb the culture of other countries; the understanding of differences, then, is a source of mutual enrichment.

In keeping with the finest tradition of patronage, FENDI is not supporting an exhibition but a cultural project, taking an active interest in the shows mounted by the artist and also promoting installations in public spaces. The leading Italian firm, which is world famous for its ability to represent the values of tradition in constantly renewed forms, chose Cecchini because of certain areas of affinity which, though developed on different planes, reveal a great sensibility for materials and an interest in technological research.

The exhibition features two large installations plus some other new works arising from Cecchini’s current artistic concerns, which, using different languages and techniques, explore a variety of media.

One of the two projects, Empty walls - just doors, involves the creation of a space housing a series of communicating rooms that form a kind of compact labyrinth. The space inside is divided up into a number of empty rooms connected by a series of door sculptures, which are the fulcrum of the entire installation. Positioned at the edges of the rooms, they are replicas, in grey rubber, of various types and sizes of doors and are made from life-sized moulds. Sagging physically, the sculptures seem to be “present absences", improbable thresholds, ductile diaphragms in a space for which they have become the materialized memory.

Passing through the doors creates a suspension in time. Matter is rendered fluid, the support structures yield and the architectural nature of the doors is denied; they become enigmatic presences that seem to be images of everyday existence in the aftermath of a catastrophe. The yielding nature of the doors is emblematic of a frustrated existential condition in which even reality fades and the present seems to be eternally suspended between the real and the virtual.

The other large installation in the extensive gallery space is based on the idea of modularity and organic fluidity; in this sense, the morphological background, the biomorphic and cellular structure return to being a kind of design criterion organised and articulated by the technical possibilities of virtualisation and numerical calculus. The design and industrial-scale production of some 50,000 modular elements will result in a suspended aerial structure that is strongly associated with the idea of something organic, of a molecular but at the same time an artificial organism. This gives rise to a form with a “richly imaginative" openness to different interpretations, but which ultimately expresses a persistent theme in Cecchini’s work, namely a concern with operating on the borders between the natural and the artificial, and how perception and cognition relate to these.

Besides the large installations, the show also includes a new series of design collages. The former comprises a set of drawings adopting a mixture of techniques, 3D drawings and small models produced in a wide range of materials and enclosed in large transparent folders the surfaces of which are heat-deformed; these works evidence a constant shift between poetic investigation and experiential practicability, and a move towards an increasingly architecturally oriented working practice.

In the work of Loris Cecchini (b. 1969), photography, drawing, sculpture and installation blend into a single poetics in which the key element is transfiguration. The subjects of his works are multiple collages and detailed architectural models, rubber objects, reinvented caravans and tree houses, structurally distorted spaces, and prismatically transparent covers and surfaces. The variety and morphology of the elements constantly interrelate in a continuously alternating process of deconstruction and reconstruction sited at the interchange between the physical reality of the materials and virtualised presence.

In both the photographs and the sculptures the reexamination of a broad notion of the ‘model’ involves reworking familiar everyday forms into a modified vision that challenges the viewer’s perceptions. By means of subtle digital processing, the artist juxtaposes slices of reality with physical/virtual scenarios reconstructed via studio models, creating various situations that lie between the plausible and the paradoxical.

he idea of modelling and of paradox can also be found in the life-size replica objects reproduced in grey polyurethane rubber: like ghosts and shadows of their real referent, the objects look helpless, bent over double, thereby acquiring a certain character and irony that make them somehow human rather than just being mere objects.

Link to "Italia in Cina 06": http://www.italiancina2006.org

Special Thanks: Fendi，Vision

Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, 1st floor
Add: No.27 Duolun Road, Shanghai 200081

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