Répétition Générale
a group exhibition presented by Isabelle Sciamma
Répétition Générale is born from a simple wish to present some significant works, of a handful of 1/9unosunove’s artists, that have never before been shown in Rome. Most of the pieces have been travelling between institutional exhibitions in Paris, Brussels, and Berlin, and now finally arrive to the Roman audience. This Répétition Générale on the gallery’s ‘stage’ is also intended as an anticipation of 1/9unosunove’s ambitious 2014/2015 exhibition program that, starting from March, involves some of 1/9unosunove’s selected artists. Together with Raffaella Crispino, Per-Oskar Leu, Jamie Shovlin and Jonathan VanDyke, Sergio Lombardo has accepted our invitation. Lombardo, who lives and works in Rome, will participate at Répétition Générale with some of his most recent works of stochastic paintings, characterized by the concept of ‘repetition’, investigated both as a science and a method.
Raffaella Crispino | The video Untitled (Israel) (2009) shows some images shot in Israel, through which the artist searches for the concurrence of conflicting elements in a delicate unsaturated fresco. Opening with the famous “Voice of Peace”, a free radio station that used to broadcast from a boat in front of Tel Aviv, the images are then accompanied by a gloomy and disquieting sound resulting from the manipulation of the jingle of that radio. The artist wants to render the feeling that one could feel during his stay in the Holy Land, where the noise made by the helicopters alternates with the other one coming from the fans located in the touristy places and the holiness of Jerusalem interchanges with the scar of the Bethlehem’s wall that divides Israel and Palestine.
Per-Oskar Leu | Crimes of the Future (2011) is at first glance an installation aimed at dogs. A series of small photographs showing hunting dogs are positioned at the eye-level of a medium-size canine. A hat made of raccoon skin, placed in the center of the installation, seems to look at the pictures. Since the 80’s, the presence of this species, originally native to east Asia, has been growing in Norway, so much that nowadays it has become the subject of an eradication campaign by the authorities, arguing that it represents a potential threat to the traditional composition of Norwegian wildlife. The artist elaborates a metaphorical paralel between this situation and the political marginalization applied to groups of immigrants in present-day Norway.
Sergio Lombardo | The Stochastic Painting was born in 1980, from the precise will to counter with the wide range of figurative return that characterized the same period. End point of Lombardo’s reserch about automated methods that generate random images, this works are created by algorithms that modulate various parameters: proportion between colours, proportion between B/W, percentage of curved and stright lines, level of order and chaos, continuity and discontinuity. Appearing as geometrical and irregular patterns, they are aimed, according to the artist’s purpose, to stimulate the viewer’s imagination.
Jamie Shovlin | These 24 watercoulours are part of Fontana Modern Masters, a project that examines the historically parasitic connection between the fine arts and the human sciences. Issued at a time when the fine arts were at their most derivative of philosophical and psychological texts, the Fontana books reverse the traditional connection, using the fine arts as a selling point for the human sciences. Through a scientific investigation into the connections between the colour and design of the books’ covers and their relation to the ‘Masters’ discussed within each book, the artist create the covers of the ten ‘lost’ books. The project’s focus is establishing relative values of both ‘Master’ and colour – basically grading thinker and colour – and questioning the notion of objective research methodology.
Jonathan VanDyke | VanDyke’s work, Costume (Rome, Winter 2014), offers to the viewer signifiers that we normally associate with painterly process – canvas stained and marked with colours. Yet the artist has pushed and pulled painting in such a way that these signifiers are displaced. Undoing media-specific boundaries, VanDyke reorients modernist conventions, conflating painting with fiber arts, fashion, dance, textile design, and photography. With multiple collaborators and processes involved, the work subverts notions of painting’s singularity and challenges the idea of individual authorship.
For any further information please contact:
gallery@unosunove.com