^{Glory

Black

Hole}

Andrea Martinucci
Solo Show - November 14^th

Curated by Dimora Artica
Text by Claudia Contu

In partnership with Renata Fabbri Arte Contemporanea Project Assistant: Vincent Noir

Dimora Artica presents Glory Black Hole, solo show by Andrea Martinucci (Rome, 1991), in collaboration with Renata Fabbri arte contemporanea. With a text by Claudia Contu, a catalogue published in limited edition and a website, the project by Martinucci includes some new paintings from the .jpeg series and an installation whose aim is to transform the exhibition space in a place halfway between real and virtual life.

︎ Click here for download the catalog

― Nothing unknown is knowable.
Don't you think it's depressing?” ―

Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

The year is 2018. From here, I’m able to see the hallmarks of a global epistemological and visual crisis (along with some ecological, economic and political ones as well) that is manifested through a collective refusal for former established meanings or moral inscriptions. The easy stability through which one thing was seemingly good and the other potentially threatening is not given for granted anymore, nor is the general agreement on calling a person a “she” or a “he”, or saying that anthropology is about humans, or that this piece of carrot cake I’m eating exists but doesn’t perceive reality. Actually, if you take AIs, which are technically objects (they don’t breathe) learning from reality, you may agree in saying that they have to perceive and experience reality, if they want (do they?) to learn from it.

On the other hand, this visual crisis partakes in the realm of aesthetics: we face a degree of refusal towards the Western aesthetic paradigms grounded in Kant’s Critique of Taste that involves art and extends to all sorts of creative fields. The coming back of bad taste is a sign of it: pictures from the last Balenciaga campaign might be nothing but ‘beautiful’, but that doesn’t retain the people from liking them. Italian theorist Lea Vergine, in writing about the use of trash in art, stated that “we ourselves have been discarded or rejected by other human beings; more or less on a daily basis, we are forced to recover, scrape together and reassemble fragments of ourselves” (L. Vergine, When Trash Becomes Art. Trash rubbish mongo, 2007: 7). I recognise myself in a shot by Balenciaga more than I would in front of Samothrace’s Nike. Abstract ideals don’t appeal to me anymore: I crave the awkwardness, lameness, and hybridity of reality and fantasy collapsing into each other. That is what affects who I am; what my place in this world is.

This premise means that I can mix things up for the sake of doing it, while creating unexpected forms of meaning and ways of feeling. The work of Andrea Martinucci (*1991, Rome) seems to sit here, in the realm of Speculative Realism, a place where elements of the real are combined with speculation - the same metropolis that is also inhabited, in different neighbourhoods, by artists like Björk, Jesse Darling, Marguerite Humeau, Lawrence Lek, Alessandro Michele, Hardeep Pandhal, and many others. Andrea’s work makes use of pictures found on the Internet and representing moments from other users’ lives. Once layered with colour-field painting, lines and writings, the narration they originally embodied is erased and lost. This raw material, or digital trash, is thus involved in a process of annihilation as the result of the volume in which it comes or is reproduced on the web. Originally meant to tell stories and share memories, those pictures are now unreadable and this gives you, the beholder, a chance to wonder what it all was about, what the need behind sharing those pictures was, what or who was in the background, and so on. Forms, colours, and subjects used by Andrea reflect the contemporary aesthetic of consumption while taking advantage of DIY graphics and crappy futuristic designs inspired by the fast-paced technological development we witness every day.

For Glory Black Hole, the artist has created a setting that stays in between ordinary life and virtual reality. The canvasses from the .jpeg series inhabit Dimora Artica’s groud floor with a curtain displaying “Bliss” (Windows XP’s most famous wallpaper), chosen by Microsoft among a number of stock images probably because of its inviting qualities, which would hopefully produce a sense of wellbeing in desk-based employees. If this sense of wellbeing seems artificial and perhaps unachievable, on the contrary the veil in Dimora Artica’s space invites you to overcome the hill and reach out for new images, new narratives and new horizons beyond it. Evoking Arthur Schopenhauer’s veil of Maya, the work suggests that only by overcoming an initial state of blindness, which is given by the novelty of the experience you’re gathering, you will be able to enter a world where nobody can say that A equals A alone and is different from B, because everything will be just like a dream. To a certain extent, no hypothesised narration will be satisfying enough to fully understand objects, people, the situations they enable or the universe itself. On the first level of the gallery, the misappropriation of one of the most famous maxims of the Western philosophical tradition plays with this potential of being mistaken and warns about the presumption of assessed narratives that serve to establish knowledge systems and beliefs from arbitrary points of view.
An epistemological crisis, as I said at the beginning.

To keep dreaming, visit gloryblackhole.cargocollective.com

C. C.

Photographs : Andrea Cenetiempo

^{Everytime you

switch me off,

I die. A little.}

Artists: Daniela Corbascio, Claude Eigan, Alexandra Koumantaki,
Andrea Martinucci, Catalina Ouyang, David Stjernholm and Maurizio Vicerè

Organised Like a Little Disaster
with Giuseppe Pinto & Paolo Modugno
+
a dreamtale by Jonny Tanna,

FOOTHOLD, Polignano a Mare, Bari.

27th April/ 2nd June 2018

ON
– Where does the flame of a candle go when the candle is turned off? Where does the light go? Where does the past go?
Firstly I realized that I am not immobile at the center of the universe. Then that I am not distinguished and different from any other sentient and non-sentient being. That I am far from being entirely transparent to myself. Now, digital light tells me that I’m not a separate agent, but an informatic organism sharing with others a global environment fundamentally made up of information: the luminous Infosphere.
I observe myself observing myself in the communicative production; I see myself with the eyes of a possible audience; I glimpse myself in the luminous traces I produce online. I observe the light and light observes me and captures me, I am subjected to it.
I risk losing myself in the labyrinthic network of changeable and temporary connections, the fragmentation of the perception of myself corresponds to a multiplicity of incoherent and disconnected relations. These intermittences push me in a myriad of directions, leading me to play a quantity of roles such as to make disappear my self-conciousness.
– Does the self completely saturated by digital light become a non-self?
In the luminous technosphere there is the possibility not yet present in the real world. Each manifestation in physical reality must have a luminous representation. All changes in physical nature are consequence of digital information processes; nature has ended up in digital light.
I live in a place where autonomous intelligences multiply themself, where body-machines generate images fed by autonomous information that become new forms of life, where millions of environments cohabit in the same physical space, creating a chain of parallel worlds. The image becomes dematerialized, while I merge myself with a luminous medium that questions the notions of authorship, corporeity.
Identity is overloaded by the plurality of my iconic projections, falling into a biological imbalance where an informative proliferation develops, a background light characterizes the identity itself, to the point of confusing it with the traces of other actors distributed in the network.
Light allows me to enter an area with weak borders, subject to continuous redefinition, marked by multiple belongingness and osmosis between center and border. Through light I instantly propagate myself in every direction, I multiply myself in an endless process, I extend myself in every direction.
I am surrounded by luminous flares that amplify my ability to look into matter and through space. I know, I perceive, I meet and communicate with others and with the environment through lights-prosthesis making body with my body, quickly dissimulating one’s own otherness.
I am present-absent. Absent in the presence. I am here and there at the same time, I am on and off, my body expands itself, turns itself, extends itself, “naturally”. I am in the light of a transpersonal experience that allows me to look at the interconnection of everything, the permeability and instability of boundaries, the lack of distinction between the part and the whole, the foreground and the background, the context and the content.
I move in a landscape where the flesh no longer needs redemption because it has already become a body of light.
PRAISE BE TO THE FLAWLESS, ALL-PERVASIVE ILLUMINATION OF THE GREAT MUDRA. TURN OVER TO ME THE JEWEL, LOTUS AND RADIANT LIGHT.

OFF
More beautiful than the day, peaceful by all means, the star-studded, pensive and soft night is a better model of knowledge than the sun-struck, cruel, exclusive, eye-hurting, ideologically-prone and opinion-ridden light of day.
I live in a fluid space that extends the finite limits of traditional metaphysics, traceable to the anthropocentric sight and light, that is, linked to the space-time dimension proper to human sensoriality. I free myself from the anthropological structure anchored to the “vision”, to the truth of evidence, and lose myself in the trans-human horizon, revealed as trans-optical, trans-luminic, trans-spatial, trans-temporal….
My universe refers to what is widespread, not localizable or definable, to what is not shown, to what is stingy with signs, expressing itself, if it does, in an ambiguous and transversal way.
Light blinds me and prevents me from seeing. It is the shadows to give me the perception of depth, to make the sensible world endowed with density and concreteness. I need shadows to leave the opacity that is proper to the object. I need shadows to escape from the blinding light of a flattened universe.
I was in the center of an immense grotto. The ground was covered with fine sand bespangled with gold. The vault was as high as that of a Gothic cathedral, and stretched away out of sight into the distant darkness. The walls were covered with stalactites of varied hue and wondrous richness … The decomposition of the luminous rays by the thousands of prisms, the showers of brilliancy that flashed and flowed from every side, produced the most astonishing combination of light and color that had ever dazzled the eyes of man.

^{DA FRANCO}

Senza Appuntamento #2
Artists: Michele Gabriele, Emiliano Maggi, Andrea Martinucci, Caterina Morigi e Lorenzo Pace

Organised by Andrea Polichetti, Niccolò De Napoli and Silvio Saccà. Curated by Vasco Forconi
with the contribution of NERO editions, Untitled Association, Monitor Gallery Rome, Operativa Arte Contemporanea, Rome.

Visiting curator: Laura Amann, Significant Other, Vienna

Franco Candela - barber shop - Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, Rome.

19thApril / 20th May 2018

“Senza Appuntamento” is a dynamic and ironic response to the condition of radical economic and existential precariousness which multiple generations of artists, curators and workers in the field of culture are facing. Thanks to its light collective and horizontal structure, the project is designed to open a physical but most of all a relational space for artists where they can discuss and compare their research practices, giving at the same time to the public an opportunity to know more about the work done by young artists.
The project constitutes an emerging and open platform which will overtime tell about what is going on in the city of Rome while developing a dialogue with other active independent entities in Italy and Europe. On this occasion, Laura Amann, founder of the space Significant Other in Vienna will be invited to come to Rome as a visiting curator. The uniqueness of the project also resides in the incredible nature of the space that Franco Candela, owner of the Barberia, granted with generosity and enthusiasm. It is a space suspended in time, a space of an absolute social heterogeneity but most of all, it is a space for work.

The space offers a real comparison between two completely different ways of working: there is the artist’s work and the labour that take place in the Barberia on a daily basis. This makes room for broader a reflection of which the exhibition represents the first tangible representation.

Photographs: Giorgio Benni

^{THE

COURT}

Voyage au bout de la nuit curated by Maurizio Vicerè - Vice
LAW FIRM DI PIETRO - LUCCHI, Pescara, Italy
16 dicembre – 25 FebbraioArtists: Cosimo Casoni, Andrea Martinucci, Marco Strappato

THE COURT, the newly created concept space in Pescara, has the pleasure to present the first exhibition project Voyage au bout de la nuit curated by Maurizio Vicerè - Vice and with the participation of the artists Cosimo Casoni, Andrea Martinucci and Marco Strappato. The exhibition will take place in the new Law Firm Di Pietro - Lucchi in Piazza della Rinascita, 24 Pescara. THE COURT is a project designed to find opportunities for encounter between visual artists and intellectuals through literary works among the most recognized of the 21st century. For this first edition we have tried to develop a meeting between the artists Casoni, Martinucci, Strappato and the fundamental work Voyage au bout de la nuit - Journey to the end of the night - by author Louis Ferdinand Celine. It will then start from the very title of the novel as an exclusive material of reflection and left to the free interpretation of artists. It is no coincidence that the three artists have been chosen to work with convergence points and conceptual proximity to amplify the aura of Celiniana's work, unique in its genre and inspiration for most modern and contemporary literature.

The Journey and the Night are therefore the edges that limit the presence of a whole where chaos occurs through the impossibility of a linear path since, while it is true that time moves in one direction, the same cannot be said of man who through two infinite - the inner one and the one just out of the body - keep alive the unconsciousness of moving with freedom, singular ways and reactions. The same applies to Celine's "Travel" crossed by the singular prophetic cynicism of Ferdinand Bardamu anti-hero who through the author finds himself absorbed by a part of the world that he will never understand .

The only glimmer, the only certainty, the only morsel of salvation and sometimes beauty is the night, she alone accompanies him on a journey to the limits of human existence.

Photographs: Pierluigi Fabrizio

FOREVER
NEVER COMES

“Etruscans? Etruscans never existed. You may ask where they came from; if they came from the continent, from Minor Asia or America. You also make hypothesis that they have always been here. So, you are all both right and wrong, you are considering an issue that doesn’t have sense. Would it make sense asking where Piedmontes, Tuscans or Milaneses come from?”
Luciano Bianciardi, Il lavoro culturale, 1957
Etruscans used to transform themselves and this is why they arrived until us. Why talking about time in contemporary art if new technologies that are indulging artists in their productive time are becoming part of a mechanism that was already obsolete in its century, or even in the decade next to the creation of the work of art itself? Who are the artists that succeeded in staying in time and holding a dialogue with it? Does the development of the past by facing up the future make sense? The exhibition FOREVER NEVER COMES will deal with these themes by creating a new multi-temporal path about the meaning of contemporary art that needs to dialog with the artworks and the archaeological finding of the Archaeological Museum of Grosseto and the Archeological Park of Roselle.
The artists selected, both emergent and established, will be chosen on a national and international level and they’ll need to compare themselves with the symbology of the past and realize a connection between space, time and art using the fortune offered by the Archaeological Museum as an inspiration. Every artist will make an artwork that can be an expositive project or an installation, focused on one or more temporal sections among PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE. There will be also the possibility to include some of these works in the boxes of the Archaeological Museum in order to create a relation between different historical periods.
The major goal of this project is to give life to a cultural program dedicated to a variegated public with the aim to promote territory and the relation that it and its story have with contemporary art. Special attention will be given to those artists that will valorise in the best way the Maremma territory and its national and international dialog with history and art.
To have a strong promotion of the initiative will be organized conferences, events and collaborations with other cultural institutions. There will also be some didactic activities, organized thank to the contribution of the Educative Service of the Archaeological Museum; it’s about a series of laboratories and guided tours dedicated to students of primary and secondary schools. These activities are organized in six different didactic unities, each of theme composed of three laboratories, according to the history programs of schools. The duration of every laboratory is about two hours and generally includes a tour of the museum followed by interactive activities.

Photographs : Carlo Bonazza

ENDLESS
BACK UP

Curated by ULTRASTUDIO

BENOIT MENARD, OLIVER PAUK, ANDREA MARTINUCCI, ZSOFIA KERESZTES, DOMINIK, SEBASTIAN WICKEROTH, RAPHAEL LERAY, SYNCHRODOGS
Opening: Monday 27, March
March, 28 - April, 15

OUTER SPACE
ARS exhibition by Ginevra Bria and Atto Belloli Ardessi.
FUTURDOME.
Via Paisiello, 6 – 20131 Milan (IT)

“Look at this cochere door! Dwarf! I continued: it has two faces. Two paths here agree: no one has ever paths to the end… This long way to the door and back: it lasts an eternity. And this long way out the door and forward, that is another eternity”.
(Thus spoke Zarathustra. Friedrich Nietzsche)

Atlante_
Astral date unknowed_
I feel lost_
Scanning_
Traveling continuously for boundless space is possible. Visit exotic worlds and parallel universes, know the curves of the time, the movements of Sioux endless dances. Travel distances between sidereal signs of present stems from time immemorial it is equally possible. Crossing the left doors of access to satellites that revolve around our shamans perpetual consciences. Admire the hanging gardens of Babylon and then sit down to talk with Destiny and find him obedient it is finally possible. A new world is showing in front of my eyes. This time it's for sure the world from which I left blank. I can hardly recognize it but I feel like familiar. Yet so far, trillions of galaxies far, we have traveled desirous of knowledge for decades whose account is lost. Now I'm here, and I find the endless return. It's been thousands of years and things appear as a new but faded, I forced a door and I find this present still active on my most peripheral and archaic hemisphere of my brain. I'm having a deja vu?
Scanning_
"This I've seen ... I know that person ... I know how it works ... It was so long that it felt not to mention ...". Amarcord. And yet it all seems so rarefied, impalpable, away: it seems to attend the tangibility of echo. Redundancy signals. An holographic memory, fiction. Simulacra of an upcoming reality.
Scanning_
If it were not for my mortal flesh I would say to be in front of what we have tried to find continuously. The Phoenix.
I rediscover a new feeling, an awakening from millennial slumber which start weaned. I’m touching this world. It’s the first time and it seems in all a first time. I feel to be entered in connection with this world, I feel a gentle pressure on my meat, everywhere the same pressure. I feel the cold is just a reverse transfer to a feeling if intense heat. I breathe deeply the smell of an old radio. I close my eyes. My robe melts, becomes the first fiber, fragments then finally dust all around. I imagine. On the face drawing a smile. Funeral house.
I open my eyes. I try to find myself and I am not.
I arrived.
I’m feeling lost.
Love you all.
Adamo.

Photographs : Ivan Divanto

Welcome
back Billy

14.03.17 – 19.03.17
Aggetelek Duo, Annabelle Arlie, Andrea Martinucci,
Billy Lidh, Giuseppe Mastromatteo, Maurizio Vicerè – Vice

Basement. Milan

Partner: Scandale Project

“Long live the Theater,
where it’s all fake but nothing is false,
and this is true.
And you know from before, if is dyed Othello,
or he’s black …
No actor wants you believe,
pushing hard intonation,
it’s all true what you see.
He wants to show that it is a fiction.
If you have to die on stage
it is true that does not really die otherwise,
who would die so well?
Understand by yourself, really:
If he really dies
might not die every night!”