New Works #1 at Sprovieri Gallery

Sprovieri presents new sculptural works created by Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Micol Assaël, Gabriele De Santis, Seb Patane, Jorge Peris, Pietro Roccasalva and Marinella Senatore.

Upon a small marble slab the information for the exhibition New Works #1 at Sprovieri Gallery in London is engraved. The invite is the work of art, and that the moment is a unique event can be deduced by Giorgio Andreotta’s “Clessidra” (Hourglass).This piece, like the others in the exhibition, brings together several aspects of Italian sculpture during recent years creating the perspective of an artistic landscape divided between a richness of study and experimentation and the difficulty of converging within an identity ravaged by an above all cultural crisis. Never before has a generation reflected upon Agamben’s texts and theories on the contemporary quite like this one. From its identification in obscurity up to the distinction between contemporary and current. A series of contradictions that aim to explain one of the most controversial periods in Italian cultural identification. At first glance the detachment from Italy, from a territory that has buried the concept of contemporary only to find it once more in recovering the Warburgian canon of buried culture. A territory that appears more as a landscape of quicksand in which the present is ever sinking, and in which the solid basis of the past acts rather as an impervious headstone. And yet these elements that seem negative perhaps are not, other than for the politicians who always have their responsibilities.

Italian contemporariness is elsewhere, dissolved in other regions like an emigrant, or in a deep analysis of the “I” before an interminable history. A look into a shattered mirror, the fragments of which multiply time into a kaleidoscopic puzzle. Yet in this catastrophic scene a moment of reflection and meticulous production seems to be expressed by a contemporary art that tries to study the deepest aspects of history, taking a stand in a landscape in which the window from which to behold it must be invented daily. And it is no coincidence if all this falls back on sculpture. A technique that uses the surrounding space as time, as a construction of its own individual outlook, multiplying points of view and perspectives. Neither is it by chance that this exhibition aims to examine precisely these aspects that are intrinsic to an Italian situation and that this examination passes through the analysis of a sculpture. As opposed to other media, sculpture reacts differently to time. It does not wish to build the illusion of space, reconstructing it through a perspective pretence, but rather it wishes to bring together the view of the visitor with the work of art, using the surrounding space as a kaleidoscope of different visions.