The Sound Of Painting

Torino

In the historic Master Apartment of Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana, six authoritative protagonists of the contemporary art scene currently explore the dynamic side of painting, forging an extremely diachronic language to interpret two-dimensional art. The temporal sphere of rhythm wraps the surface of the works in the show, triggering a movement of a narrative, reiterative, surreal, materic or even sculptural nature, through which the aesthetic encounter between pictorial space and the transient implication of sound takes place.

Participating artists are:

Ali Banisadr sublimates the tragedy of the Islamic revolution and the war between Iran and Iraq in imaginary atmospheres charged with memories, nostalgia and chaos. The artist’s gesture, primarily inspired by antique Persian miniatures, breaks free in certain areas from its painstaking figurative practice, celebrating with large brushstrokes abstract dances of colors. The war, colonialism and corruption become the major themes of an original “poetics of conflict”, developed through a synesthetic code that translates auditory memory into lyrical vision of a distant time, yet one that is perpetual in its obsessive regeneration.

Indicated by international critics as one of the most renowned painters of her generation, Inka Essenhigh explores the border territory between abstract, surreal and figurative art, giving rise to fairytale settings and personalities of sinuous elegance. In Inka Essenhigh’s paintings the progress-based culture of the industrial age is sublimated inside a pagan world where myth and magic hold sway, almost as if to suggest the escapism of dreams – “inner vision” – as the only reasonable postmodern pharmakon.

The Chicago-based artist, musician and activist Theaster Gates rediscovers the evocative power of humble materials, generating a universe of installations, sculptures and musical performances that combine forces in a non-anachronistic narrative of a political history profoundly marked by violent oppression and ongoing attempts to overcome it. Gates sets out to bring new meaning to abandoned places and forgotten objects, to the point of revealing, in the formal hermeticism of a framed fire hose, a true epitaph of civil rights.

The expressive vocabulary of Rashid Johnson finds its roots in the concept of „black experience“, articulated in his works thanks to constant use of tropes and symbols that retrace the history of Afro-American intellectual movements, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Back to Africa Movement. Most of the sculptures reflect a sense of hybrid rapport with the medium of painting that can also be seen in the multiple interventions on wooden panels – where branded symbols, black soap, waxes and paints invade the surface – and in the classic wall shelves, dense with reminders of jazz and soul music.

Angel Otero explores the constituent substance of the painted work, outlining a narrative suspended between the diachronism of memory and the synchronic nature of the artwork, through a key of interpretation that reflects multiple influences (the materic emphasis of David Hammons, the abstract expressionism of William De Kooning, or the chromatic energy of Joan Mitchell) whose final synthesis takes the form of an utterly personal approach. In the works of the Puerto Rican artist the „skin“ of the painting (oil skin) takes form away from the canvas, which only at the end of the whole process hosts, on its „body“, infinite sheets of paint.

In the work of Tim Rollins and K.O.S the reflections of important classical and modern writers like Aeschylus, Martin Luther King, Aristophanes, Franz Kafka, Homer, William Shakespeare, Dante and Gustave Flaubert take on an iconographic guise that embraces literature, music and visual art in order to shape an aesthetic praxis with a strong accent on collaboration, whose cultural underpinnings can be seen in the need for profound social change; a transformation that starts with inner sentiment and then breaks loose in shared creativity.

The Sound of Painting

Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana

November 10th – November 30th, 2012
Via della Consolata 1 bis
Torin
Italy

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