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Crystal Discipline
by Paolo Emilio Antognoli
A Gio Ponti’s epigraph (“Architecture is a crystal”) and one of his design subject – frostbound futuristic geometries, circus quarries, suprematist memories, Malevic sportsmen between 20s and 30s. – These are the starting-points for a meditation concerning the relation between bodies, education, architecture and European “modernism” politics in 80s.
A sort of tableau-paravent, used to hide the body to undress, shame and erotism object, it becomes a projection screen, a sort of circus show, and vaguely post-modern.
“From the crystal’s point of view”, this could be the project’s alternative title. The crystal like a geometric see-through body which, from a watcher glance, refracts a different, disjointed, faceted realness which becomes the metaphor of the Fordism’s man invention: the XIX century man-machine, orker and soldier, observed through the prism of the new-order.
Gymnastics and spectacular choreographies built as crystollagraphy exercises and observed from solids, polyhedrons, pyramids, prisms, parallelograms point of view.
A study on the spectacular through a photographic gallery of sportive and architectural imagines from fascism time, which are disassembled, refracted, slowed, hijacked in search of spoilage, of non-scheduled, of a sudden crack in the representation.
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by Paolo Emilio Antognoli
Coloured lights spread into the space with intermittent flashes. Modernist geometries on the walls, projections and painted surfaces create a unitary environment under a banner of photochromatic brightness. Children with sunglasses are outstretched in a circle like a mysterious corolla. The exact movements of a child are repeated endlessly like an automaton’s movements (...).
Daniele Bacci presents his show in Nicola Ricci’s art gallery recreating a modernist environment where colours, figures and geometrical background paintings act like the barkers of an enigmatic circus in which the selected time is the eternal present of the society of the spectacle.
The artist revisits the daily aspects of the social history of modernism, investigating through architecture and aesthetics the production of biopolitical subjectivity and, in this particular case, the gradual economic and ideological rationalisation of “Post-Fordist” leisure time.
The photos of a heliotherapic colony for children of the fascist age are the point of departure for this work. During summer the children must expose themselves to the sunlight or to a sunlamp – exactly like the figures in the circle of the big painting displayed in the gallery. The background of the painting on which the children seem to lie down, suggests both the irradiation of a pyramid of light and at the same time, a perspective. But these colours have been selected in order to interact with the photochromatism of the work that is presented opposite: a projection of different coloured lights with a screen that illuminate the whole room.
Like advertisements that make reference to the world of consumption. The artist returns, once again, to the twentieth-century project investigating the historical and morphological roots of the present.
The bright kinetic energy of a cubic sculpture refers to the unusual spectacle of the figure in movement, going over the history of the modernist cinema, with references to the litography of Hippolite Lecomte in Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir, illustrating the right behaviour of pupils. Mutual references are made from the primitive phantasmagorias of Modernity, of which Walter Benjamin wrote, to the present entertainment industry.
The intermittent lights of the chromatic projections, which are flashing over everything, apart from recalling the morphology of the solarium of the heliotherapic camps, communicate above all the word “Consuma” (Consume) in Morse Code. And this word, between indicative and imperative, repeats itself incessantly.
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Look-out: marginal notes on pictorial represntation
by Lorenzo Bruni
His approact to the painting derives from the try to allude and so to discover what there is over the image that he takes in conconsideration. Perhaps it is for this reason that his presentations feed on the concept of duality, that goes over the idea of symmetry.
The subjects of his paintings are architectonical volume dried by any infrastructures that, hacked on the white surface of the canvas, become minimal and pure forms. But they can also be representation of single natural elements as a little tree. In this case we are hastened to make a sudden swerve between the idea of the image and it’s presentation in that specific case.
So, looking with attention, the tree is little but not young, it seems being well and standing, but in reality, it’s like this by a stick that support it, just as the architectures that reveal themeselves as full structure as they were not auto determinate ideas. Just from this we understand that the research of the artists starts from the nowadays schizophrenia that we have between what is natural, what it seems natural, and what we consider natural.
In the collective in Via Farini, Milano (2003) he has let us find a little painting with one of his architectures (product of rationality human construct) nearby an acrylic drawing, the spontaneity of the nature, or revealing the mithological aspect we invest today this world). Instead in Codogno (2003) ... the image on the painting was the Torre Velasca, but the canvas was put on high, reproducing he effect of subjection and the point of control that the architecture has on the city of Milan.
In Daniele Bacci the relations between the visible and the dreamed, between the representable and the autonomos and uncontrolled concretisation, go to constitute themselves as solution that could cohabit nearby without any denial. Instead of take us in a blind alley, or in the acceptaion of this extravaganza, he puts it as an element which reacting, which take position.
Only in some case this two parallel ways are joined, as in the work presented in the Gallery T293, Napoli (2003). On the projection on the wall (in filmslide) of a big image of the low part of beech wood, there was, as cover impressed by an ink drawing directly on the wall, the trees root. What usually isn’t visible here discloses itself, even if it comes out over the limit of the image.
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Daniele Bacci
by Paola Guadagnino
Daniele Bacci’s exhibition project consists in a series of paintings difficultly understandable, due to the absence of material component and such rigorous as some digital printings; never the less the connection with the computer is only the first of many possible links, traceable in the artist’s works. Bacci portrays, with a rgrous and solid paint, a set of schoolasic buildings in order to clearly state the tension between architecture and freedom, and to highlight the following conditioning over the individual’s forming.
The artist considers these paintings like separate units of a file in which various typology of solemn and formally impeccable construction are listed.
In its starting farm, even if the project happen postponed, the construction of a building is compared with an irrevocable choice: once done, the project will last forever.
The image of a poplarwood is equally rigorous, showed with a simple projection placed by the artist close to the paintings; the wood’s shape is the result of the placement of the trees, planted in exact paints, in an irrevocable way.
Working at the rappresentation , the artist archieves the transformation of the reality due to the painting itself, to the light and to the hard building’s shapes; because of their simpleness, they reprent a natural starting point for the evolution.