Andrea Bianconi: You and Myself

With “You and Myself”, Andrea Bianconi (Vicenza, 1974) returns to Casa Testori, filling most of the rooms with his repertoire of performances, built up over ten years, in which the artist uses the body as an expressive language and a symbolic matrix. A symbol that does not seek spectacular exhibition or provocative revelation. A symbol that acquires its own being (its own identity) by ceasing to stand as a symbol for something. It is as if it had nothing to say, as if it had only a series of events to suggest. Events left to the observer’s intuition. Bianconi’s performances also invite us to seek what is not there (which we do not see, which we do not feel). They invite our intuition to seek the possible alternative, the other side of the world. To bring into the open the entity hidden in the other (or elsewhere). The myself that con-fuses with the you. His poetic vision is one of movement and continual transition.

The exhibition covers Bianconi’s entire itinerary of performances. Together with actions governed by playfulness (and surprise, or amazement), and minimal, restrained, incantatory actions, Bianconi develops other performances that imply genuine “collective performances”. The artist does not pose himself strict disciplinary limits, rules or hierarchies, if not those of opening himself towards others, towards the public, to arouse amazement, incredulity and interrogatives. Bianconi’s performances often approach a form of “artistic entertainment”. They may be gags, a series of apparently pointless gestures, of ridiculous playful acts. Like actors in silent films (or like children), he likes to hide himself and then burst suddenly on the scene. Masks often appear as instruments of defence, of flight, of falsity. In Trap for the Minds (2012), the artist obsessively dons and removes his mask, until we reach the final mask, which is none other than a reproduction of his own face. Numerous, too, are the images of the “traps” that Bianconi strews along the paths of his performances: boxes, mirrors, cages and masks that are often worn by his characters, without it ever becoming entirely clear whether they do this to hide themselves, isolate themselves, or to experience the dispersion, the broken boundaries of unforeseeable associations.

Andrea Bianconi lives and works in Vicenza and Brooklyn. He was selected to partecipate in the 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art with a public performance presented at the Red Square, the Kremlin, Manege. His recent exhibitions include MSK Ghent, Houston, Valencia, Madrid, New York, the United Arab Emirates, Basle, Palazzo Reale, Milan and Shanghai. In 2011, Charta published his first monograph. In 2012 Cura.Books issued his first artist’s book, “ROMANCE”. His second, “FABLE”, followed in 2013. Both are part of the MoMA, New York collection.