Aldo Tambellini & Atelier Impopulaire, 2015
Curated by: Pia Bolognesi and Giulio Bursi
Produced by Atelier Impopulaire, James Cohan Gallery New York/Shanghai, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
Study of Internal Shapes and Outward Manifestations has been realized for the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2015. Starting with a new research on the relationship between archive material, pictorial sign and transformation of the devices linked with the moving image, we developed a multiscreen installation in dialogue with the historical artistic references that influenced Aldo Tambellini production, from his study as a sculptor, under Ivan Mestrovic at Syracuse University, up to his experience at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT with the founder of Zero Group, Otto Piene (1974-1986). The core interest in projection devices and film mediums (film and slides) began in New York in 1959 grows here in parallel with a core work in plastic materials. Attracted above all by the energetic nature of painting, and influenced by the monumental canvases of Franz Kline, we transferred onto cinematic frames a meticulous expression of the power of gesture, creating an exploration of the potential to manipulate film and photography, according to different working techniques applied directly onto the medium. Film is the main object of this exchange, drawing on diverse elements that mix his classical training with the influences of kinetic sculpture, cameraless film, hypnotic cinema and direct animation. Historically, this transition came about in conjunction with the birth of New American Cinema and is part of the process from art films to the immersive environments of Expanded Cinema.
In the installation, glass becomes the ideal surface on which to place abstract forms, inspired by Bruno Mari’s Direct Projections and Man Ray’s Rayographs, and made by ink, oil and aniline-based paints onto which the artist superimposes organic materials, powder paints, and sand, often burning the wet surface of freshly applied paint to make the liquid boil and create the effects of expansion and successive contraction of the surface. Out of an output in excess of a thousand pieces, developed around a dozen or so iconographical nuclei, Study of Internal Shapes and Outwar Manifestations presents the two series Internal and Animated (1965-1969), where for the first time forms follow one other, inspired by the inside of the human body, in an abstraction that defines an intimate connection between organ, material, trace and movement.
Only within the projection this form-symbol becomes the interface between idea and moving matter, in a perceptual system that is different to the immersive structures of the nineteensixties intermedia environments, and more of a self-determining apparatus in which we decontextualise the perceptual interaction of sound and image, deliberately preserved by the tradition of the happening. In this way Study of Internal Shapes and Outward Manifestations, by retracing a stylistic evolution, gives us the summary, as organic as possible, of a procedure that retains and re-launches the synaesthesia between the elements of the same history.
Full text in the catalog published by Bompiani
May 9 - November 22
La Biennale di Venezia
All the world’s futures
Padiglione Italia
Arsenale
labiennale.org
