Giuseppe Stampone – Sarnath Banerjee: The Third Meaning

The Third Meaning. Giuseppe Stampone – Sarnath Banerjee, curated by Eugenio Viola and Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, will open to the public in the premises of the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, New Delhi on the 20th of January, 2016.

This project was initiated through timely conversation between two curators, and two artists in the framework of a cultural exchange between Italy and India.

The two artists presenting work in this exhibition are Giuseppe Stampone and Sarnath Banerjee. Both artists approach their practice from different realities, whose research and work, though far away from each other, have the practice of drawing, in common. They investigate the contradictions and the restlessness of our times, representing realities, sometimes in a controversial and polemical way.

In the practice of Stampone, drawing assumes a cognitive value, as of the ancient great masters of the Renaissance age intending to probe a scientific representation of the World. In this way, his usage of symbols and instruments conceal hidden meanings beyond their appearance, orchestrated in a process that textures the ideas in layers.
Architecture of Intelligence (2016), is the site-specific project by Stampone realized during his stay in India as part of an ongoing series of iterations. It is an archive of experience in which Stampone stages an intergenerational dialogue with other artists and cultural figures, in this case with Italian artist Stefano Arienti and his reflections on living. The installation re-assembles found-objects to construct an emotional architecture. It restores the artist’s personal diary in the form of a metaphorical housing unit, built for holding images in which the impressions of the places visited are condensed and preserved. Here, the viewer is invited to enter, to take part and share the experience it offers.

Throughout the practice of Sarnath Banerjee, the process of interlacing the textual and the visual is placed in high importance. This collation is presented within the graphic novel form, which becomes a tool for the artist to intercept history, mythology and popular culture in India and other parts of the world. Banerjee stages fictional situations of real places thereby altering the perception of what they mean to us.

His recent project All Quiet in Vikaspuri (2015), is one such account, a tale that narrates the story of a plumber and search for the fictional river Sarasvati and the consequent life journeys this process leads him to. The book recently released to the public is in fact a fictional account that speaks about the water wars of Delhi, while the city heads towards becoming one of the global megapolis.
For the first time Banerjee unbinds the book into individual drawings and sequences presenting to the public as an installation.