Tilo Schulz – Francesco Hayez
The German artist Tilo Schulz (b. 1972, Berlin) is exhibiting during the 56th International Art Exhibition at Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia. He has created a new room installation, which makes reference to the recently restored lunettes ofFrancesco Hayez (1791-1882) from the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. These art-pieces are now jointly presented for the first time thanks to the partnership between Louis Vuitton and the MUVE Foundation.
The lunettes were painted by Francesco Hayez in 1819 and are allegorical scenes about continents and oceans, the motif of which is Venice, a trading centre at the heart of an ever growing world. They depict mythical creatures or sea monsters against a scenic backdrop. These were painted nearly two centuries ago and hark back to a time when Venice was the centre of the world for worldwide trade. Originally intended to decorate the rooms of the stock exchange and chamber of commerce in circular segments, they were mounted as architectural arches under the ceiling, the position of which and also the meaningful content, rendered the human being small in the face of the wider world opening up around them. After the first recently completed restauration, these will now be shown in dialogue with a contemporary position.
Tilo Schulz responds with an installation, which undertakes a spatial as well as painterly response to the historic paintings. Two rotating round discs float parallel to each other in the space, symbolising the orbis terrarum. They rotate slowly around their own axis and are respectively two metres in diameter. One side is a (dark) mirror, the other, an evolving painting of many layers of colour. The artist calls it metaphoric painting, insofar as their abstract, dynamic surfaces of furrows and rips, and also the smooth surfaces and light areas in between, tell of unevenness and splendour which make up our world.
In connection with the 56th International Art Exhibition, curated by Okwui Enwezor‘s this year, which takes place under the title “All the World’s Futures”, Tilo Schulz poses similar questions, which were posited as curatorial guidelines for the Biennale: how do artists reflect on our world today, what sort of image is revealed? In particular he makes reference to the discourse of Enwezor, which tries to get to the bottom of a duality, today’s “state of things” in contrast to the “appearance of things”.
The artist finds a reflexive solution in his spatial installation, which can be perceived as multi-layered by the visitor. On the one hand the historic allegory confronts the metaphoric interpretation of our world today; on the other hand, it could be claimed, that everything is reflected in its interior. Not only the historic and the current view of the world, but also oneself is reflected and is inevitably connected with the particular surrounding space and its context. As a visitor, we become a part of this total world view, the centre of which is oneself.
