Since a few decades, we are witnessing the birth of several sculpture parks or sculpture gardens all over the world and especially in the USA. These amazing open-air contemporary art museums give credit not only to the old European legacy of gardens in Renaissance villas (these were, indeed, parks with contemporary sculptures!), but especially to the more recent example of Land Art and its site-specific works, which often modified the geography of the location selected by artists. The reason why this phenomenon can be considered typical in the US goes back to the enormous natural areas of the American landscape, which was inspirational also for the gigantism in some minimalist works. These enormous sculptures involved the creation of great public spaces, where visitors could enjoy large-sized artworks, which got hardly set in museum buildings. Hence, this led to a very successful integration of art with landscape, culture and nature, in the aim of getting to environmental awareness involving visual arts, architecture and city planning.

Francesca Cigola, architect and essayist, has been carrying out a research over the identity of the American landscape for many years. The outcomes of this research are well presented in this volume: Art Parks. A Tour of America’s Sculpture Parks and Gardens, which is the first complete collection of the most important open-air sculpture gardens of North America.
From large parks in boundless natural environments, to small gardens in urban contexts, from private to museums collections, Art parks is a truly reasoned, solid though portable, guidebook, which is ordered by themes in three long chapters: Leisure Spaces, areas devoted to free time, idleness, and relax; Learning Spaces, designed for learning and hosted in museums and public spaces; Collectors’ Spaces, those parks devoted to collecting, where works from private collection are shown; finally, the section Additional Parks whit a complete list of additional parks.
To the brief, though thorough, general introduction, specific profiles ensue with illustrated and detailed descriptions of every garden and beautiful pictures of landscapes and artworks. Among the great artists: Alexander Calder, Lewis DeSoto, Olafur Eliasson, William Tucker, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Henry Moore, Isaumu Noguchi, Louise Bourgeois, Mark di Suvero, Jean Dubuffet, Andy Goldsworthy, Donald Judd, and many more… (The complete index of artists in the appendix section is five pages long!). Every profile is a small essay about the story and mission of the park with a hint at useful information at the end of the page: web site, artists, and bibliography.
The book, thanks to both its format and contents, gets to the right balance between specialist essay and instructive guidebook for art and nature lovers.

Info

• Title: Art Parks
• Author: Francesca Cigola
• Editor: Luca Sassi Editore (Ita ed.); Princeton Architectural Press (En ed.)
• Year of publication: 2013
• Price: 24,00 €
• Pages: 224

www.sassieditore.it

His passion for drawing is almost innate; when he was a child, indeed, he practiced with his pencil while always keeping alive his interest for art history. However, his artistic education essentially followed autonomous drives as an autodidact, although his study of restoration, which is very close to art, actually contributed to the development of his meticulous and trial practice.
His first contacts with Street Art – which he however finds to be an inadequate label to describe his practice – date back to approximately 2001 in a very spontaneous way: “I just happened to work down the street in a particularly exciting, natural and easy moment”.
After posters and stickers, he decided to experiment with stencil, which is nowadays his distinguishing character to such extent that he would rather use the words Stencil Art instead of Street Art to describe his work, since he believes the technique to be the characterizing element of his artistic language. The only thing changing is support, which can be either an external wall as well as a canvas in a gallery. “I think Street Art is everything that has an artistic dignity and which is done in the street and follows certain definite reading and interpretational rules; the illegal aspect is one of the possibilities of expression in this movement, some people make it a philosophy of life, some others ignore it, I feel to be in between. I don’t feel so presumptuous to bring the street into the gallery, outdoor and indoor works have much to share, but at the same time to depart.”

Hence, he doesn’t personally believe this to be a contradiction because he thinks the street and the gallery are two very distinct entities, which inevitably involve two completely different kinds of approach. As the chameleon can change color every time, the artist is versatile to adapt his contents and language to the different situations he encounters: first of all, in the outside dimensions and enjoyment possibilities vary, than the image is more plain and immediate and can be perceived also from a distance and quickly when in a hurry: “I believe that when you work down the street, you have a great responsibility toward the public and the chosen spot, so it is up to the artist’s sensitivity to decide how to act toward those who live the city every day. I always try to be very critical and imagine the reactions of those who might potentially see my work every day going out; I always do my best to integrate my work with the surface and history of the area, I try to go beyond a mere wall decoration. When works are respectful, most probably they will be respected.”
The works for the gallery, instead, come to life from the intimacy of his studio: these works are more pondered and finished exactly because they are made for a different more specific public which decides to go in and look at the artworks certainly with greater attention.
Regarding his style, at the beginning it was much close to not only pop art for both colors and choice of characters, but also to hyper-realistic painting and photography for the attention to detail, which is constant in his works. Indeed, through continual exercise, investigating every aesthetic possibility, he was able to get very singular results with the stencil technique: by cutting out very elaborate half-masks, which are put one on top of the other in different colored layers, the stamped drawing turns out to be incredibly rich in detail, even in those very tiny particulars which sometimes make the works almost photographic. Despite duotone, indeed, the artist is able to also convey tonal transitions through a masterly use of chiaroscuro. Besides precision and attention to detail, which are almost obsessive, Lucamaleonte’s work distinguishes itself from other works realized with the same technique by the choice of the subjects. Usually, he favors portraits; however, his expressive research has been recently focusing on ancient imaginary reworked through contemporary schemes and with drawing playing a fundamental role: “I am trying to convey contemporaneity through the language and symbols which belong to the Italian historical and artistic tradition; with my works I usually tell about my vision of the world through symbols and codified images […] taken from anatomy, botany and social sciences books and proposing them mixed together and decontextualized.”
Inevitably, by drawing subjects from these sources, the artist ended up with learning also its specific style, which is no more serigraphic or comic, but rather close to the pure world of illustration; the obsessive approach to repetition is something which roots in archive documentation, a sort of cataloguing of icons belonging to the shared imaginary, a personal collection of artworks which aims at being a collective archive: “The role of the Internet is nowadays fundamental, since it allows the artists to reach a wider audience, offering their works to collective memory and making them eternal, something which urban art cannot be by definition.”

Back from This is Rome – the big Roman collective for Urban Art and audiovisual experimentations – the artist’s agenda includes work on several walls in Rome, which will come to life by the end of next spring, and two personal exhibitions.

Credits: the artist

It is about this December American edition of Vogue, where photographer Annie Leibovitz and stylist Grace Coddington produced a particular service where model and actress Jessica Chastain is playing the role of the protagonists of eight works of art.
The ability of the photographer in reconstructing the compositions, studying lines, colors and lights is summed up with the stylist’s sensitivity, which was able to find the most apt high fashion attire, with the result of a series of shots worthy of competing with the charm of the original works. The selection of the paintings, splendidly reinterpreted by Vogue, is exceptional and alternates more famous works with pieces less known to the public.

The actress, who is Oscar candidate, appears in all her splendor and, wearing high fashion clothing, is able to perfectly identify with the atmospheres of these wonderful art pieces: her diaphanous skin and fire red hair enhance her delicate look which seems to be recalling that of a Pre-Raphaelite muse. Indeed, the cover starts off exactly with a painting which is considered by many as the emblem of such art movement for its form, colors and iconography: it is Flaming June (1894-95) by Frederic Leighton, one of late Victorian Age masterpieces. The slight make-up and lips with a vague smile bring back all the ethereal naturalness of the original muse who lays down on a red drape, wearing a perfectly modern and suggestive calendula yellow dress by stylist Olivier Theyskens.

In the article opening page, warm colors prevail once again with tonal modulations in the model’s hair, who is lying in an room with an Oriental ornamentation, on a low-rise mattress, while she is absorbed by her thoughts and lifts her arms up to let them rest on her head. Although she is framed from a different perspective, the setting, the prurient and dreamy pose follow those of Henri Matisse’s Odalisque in Red Culottes (1869-1954). Also, the dress, which is by Marc Jacobs, is close to those Turkish trousers which give the name to the painting.

The whole atmosphere, instead, change completely in the next shot where the color scale goes from sky blue in the background wall to the dark cerulean blue in Alexander Wang’s dress, passing by a shiny aqua green in the young actress’ eyes, penetrating as those of the lady in the painting Le Retour de la Mer (Back from the Sea) (1924) by Félix Vallotton.

Wearing a gray dress by Oscar de la Renta, Jessica identifies with the interpretation of American President Grover Cleveland’s wife, who was portrayed by Anders Zorn in 1899. The distinguished beauty, the marble candor of the setting, the background grooves bring us back further in time: she is a statute in a Greek temple.

For another stunning shot, the actress plays the role of Ria Munk, who was portrayed by Gustav Klimt after her tragic death between 1917 and 1918. It is one of the most beautiful female portraits by the brilliant Austrian painter, as well as one of his last works. Leibovitz’s shot combines all the charm of the technique, Klimt’s iconography and style, which is still the favorite inspirational source for fashion designers (please look up the photographic series made up by Steven Meisel for December 2007 Vogue Italy and called “Vogue Patterns”). Vera Wang’s chiffon dress, decorated by hand, perfectly reproduces the unfinished quality of the painting (the dress and the floor are just sketched with charcoal); the background is extremely rich in floral motifs and comes alive as a real blooming garden.

Through a skilful play of colors and lights, photography is also able to reproduce Vincent Van Gogh’s confused brush strokes. In 1888, the Dutch artist portrayed a young woman from Arles and gave her the name of Mousmé, as the Japanese girl from Pierre Loti’s tale, which particularly enthralled the painter. Compared to the painting, the photograph is horizontally placed; however, it is still traditionally arranged with the model standing over a monochrome background. Clothing is designed by Alexander McQueen and reproduces the very same decorative play of the long row of red buttons in the vertical stripes coat, which gets lost in the cloud of a big polka dots skirt.

The only photograph in which the model is not wearing any dress is paradoxically the one which is inspired to Magritte’s La Robe de soirée (The evening gown) (1955). We know that Magritte’s titles are always misleading and apparently very far from the submitted subject. The shot as well remains enigmatic for its obscurity: the red hair stands out from a stretched light blue background within a turquoise sky and a quiet sea: the moon, which holds from time immemorial the reference to night in a free meaning association, stands for the unknown and mystery.

The last shot is inspired by Julia Margaret Cameron’s photos: she has been producing intense and profound portraits following the stylistic language of Pre-Raphaelites painters. Leibovitz reproduced this distinctive character: that use of focus, which is sometimes even stretched to the “out of focus”, disregards clearness and aims instead at researching plastic effects, which are possibly close to Leonardo’s sfumato.

“Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”; hence, this is a law of physics which we can apply also to art history, to the evolution of representational culture, to the ensemble of icons which constitute our shared visual imaginary.

Credits: www.vogue.com

In this way, Pink Project was born as a photographic performance which was started one year ago, a story which tells the intimate relationship of a woman with her femininity in such a dramatic moment as the diagnosis of breast cancer is. Everything is far from being tragic or painful; instead, pink warmth releases an energy which gives photographs the aura of positive lightness. Francesca, as the protagonist of all the shots, chooses to dress up with memories : the dress is the one her mother wears in many of the pictures with Francesca as a child, the wig instead is a necessity but also a way to make the path to healing more hopeful. Her identity is now that of a goblin, an almost cartoonish and pop-surrealist character which goes all around the world to spread an optimistic message charged with life and hope: a thin pink thread ties all women starting from those who are closer to her, her mother comes first, followed by her daughter, Dora – her grandmother’s name – who was strikingly born at the end-stage of the disease. Pink is femininity; hence, it involves not only sweetness and tenderness, but also motherhood: starting from the pink wig to the pink bow, the basic idea is, indeed, that of a growing project which might completely embrace the symbolism of pink as a color standing for the fight against breast cancer.

Aiming at both making people aware of this issue – which is often considered as a taboo because of its psychological implications – and at supporting research and prevention, this series was exhibited in the occasion of a show combined with a photographic set at Si Fest in Savignano. The project is now looking for sponsors to go all around Italy taking pictures of the greatest possible number of women and becoming an actual found-raising activity supporting the cause: “Who agrees can be photographed with a pink wig becoming testimonial. I am not the protagonist, all the women participating are the protagonists”.

What did the color pink represent for you in the past and what does it represent now?
F.T.: My pink is pop! I have always thought that this colored character going all around the world might become a comic strip.
Pink is today the color of my personal photographic project and the symbol of my fight.

How did your relationship with photography change?
F.T.: My love for images goes back up to my childhood: I had an exercise book with ring binder where I kept all the pictures I liked, all the pictures I tore off magazines. My first Reflex is the one I bought for myself at the end of chemotherapy. Photography and disease are two very close things because the birth of one meant the end of the other. This does not mean that I feel “safe”, I am just trying to live in the best possible way the time I will be given.

How did this creative task influence the fight against cancer?
F.T.: Focusing on creative thoughts helps putting aside negative moments, even if it is just for a little while. Many accounts show us that being committed to any cause helps living a better life!

What does this project represent for you and how would you like for people fighting for the same cause to perceive it?
F.T.: Pink Project was born as a message of optimism: I told my story because I wanted to make young women aware of prevention. Disease, a terrible experience and a taboo in our society, might turn out to be an opportunity in time. Today, I am more conscious, more energetic and happier. Probably, I wouldn’t be the same person if cancer wouldn’t have entered my life.
If with Pink Project I can give a little hope even to one single sick woman, this is a victory for me!

www.francescatilio.it
Pink Project

Info

• Title: Ti racconto l’arte del ‘900

• Author: Svjetlan Junakovic

• Editor: Artebambini

• Publication Year: 2011

• Price: 18,50 €

• Pages: 45

Her first contacts with street art date back to the first years of 2000, though she prefers avoiding this term to identify her art, which she instead considers “contextual” because down the street you are not alone with your framework. Many other factors linked to the context, indeed, stimulate creativity and revive the act of painting: first of all, the colors of the walls and light, especially sun light; the history of that wall and what is behind that wall, people passing and stopping, talking to you and telling something about themselves, those spray cans you have in your bag and brought there with you that day; and finally adrenaline, since although spaces are chosen with minimal art-historical awareness, you are anyway painting with no permission and the police could stop you anytime. However, differently from many of her colleagues who for this reason prefer remaining anonymous, Alice signs her works and works during the day open-face accepting the risks of the “trade” to fight her way against the misconception of vandalism which is still associated with street art.

This implies a certain operating speed which unfailingly makes her style more instinctive and immediately recognizable: the stroke is lively, sketched and dirty; colors are natural and play on contrasts between warm and cool hues. The color choice is driven by the moment, though certainly the tones of Rome, her city (where she still lives and works when she is in Italy), are part of her past and are indelibly embedded on her palette: that salmon pink, the colors of Rome’s buildings, contrasting with that aqua green sky, create the atmosphere reflecting a wonderful light unique to Rome. She firmly states that Rome is the work of art which has influenced her artistic research the most because it is a city where everything is designed by artists and it is possible to see so much history just walking around incredible alleys.

Chance is, hence, integral part of her work, mistakes and imperfections characterize her style, as well as her temperament, which is chaotic and messy: “During my artistic research I realized that, as Dalì used to say, your mistakes and defects are there to be sublimated: when you sublimate your defects, you have your style. I found my style and I accepted myself with all my defects: the need to completely dirty myself with color, let the drops fall down, splashing and dripping.” After all, this is an extemporary technique, working on preexisting frameworks, which are exposed to further alterations in time going beyond the artist’s will. Therefore, the finished piece lose importance in favor of first the artistic action and then the surprise effect on pedestrians. Differently from museum or gallery visitors, indeed, pedestrians do not expect to see art in those unimaginable corners; therefore, the impact with the view produces wonder which magically introduces the beholder into Alice’s narrative around the world. A universal language made of human feelings and moving images which capture little stories, everyday intimate moments that are for Alice the real magic of life.

Unaware protagonists of these spray and acrylic paint snap-shots are women far from any social stereotype and plunged into the everyday carefree, though at the same time resolute. No perfect dolls, sexy heroines or Cindarellas of the hearth, but women who are simply sleeping, reading, smoking or drinking a coffee. In April 2012, the artist decided to seal this favored theme in her first important personal exhibition at 999 Contemporary gallery in Rome and titled Cinderella, pissed me off. In this occasion, Alice had fun decorating the exhibition spaces with old shelves, wall units, and flaps which were enriched by her intervention making the location an intimate and narrative dimension with old pictures, writings and brushes. The external court is not missing, reinforcing the bond with the street: doors, shutters for light and gas counters, traffic signals

In spite of the difficulty to bring the street into the gallery, Alice masterly succeeded in transforming different recyclable frameworks into charming object-trouvé rich in memories. During her constant trips around the world, indeed, she loves picking up and collecting objects found by accident or bought at different markets. Just like the wall, these frameworks as well are not virgin as a white canvas is, but carry with them stories, offering always fresh ideas to the artist. For example, the exhibition Into the great wild open at Tri-Mission Art Gallery in Rome American Embassy, old maps convey the theme of the journey and the concept of border, from the crossing perspective and discovery of the Self.

Hence, small sketches on remote corners or entire gigantic walls, personal and collective exhibitions all over Europe, illustrations for comics and ads contributed to expand Alice’s fame: according to the classification published by Urban Painting, she is in the top ten most beloved artists in the world with more than 42.000 people following her page on social networks. Indeed, the relationship with the public is fundamental for her, since nowadays the Internet makes it much closer to rock and roll than contemporary art, becoming more enjoyable and immediate:

“You are not in front of a canvas, you don’t need to train yourself. Any interpretation is fine, especially this attitude is good because it means: open, touch and enjoy art because art is good!”

Click here for the video interview.

www.alicepasquini.com

Photo credits: Giorgio de Finis; Lorenzo Gallitto; Jessica Stewart – RomePhotoBlog.

]]> https://www.almostcurators.org/en/lui-chi-e-alice-pasquini/feed/ 0 https://www.almostcurators.org/en/art-adv-marco-rea/ https://www.almostcurators.org/en/art-adv-marco-rea/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 10:34:26 +0000 http://www.almostcurators.org/?p=752 Since the late Nineteenth Century, the billboard, emblem of modernity, has invaded the walls of the great capitals. An urban language that has since become an integral part of the artistic language and it has inspired several authors. Today, even more, the all-present intrusiveness of advertising has made these images almost invisible to our eyes. Marco Rea, born in 1975, attempts to give new life to the figures that populate the world of contemporary marketing using the billboard as a support and appropriating a process he defines “inverse” to the street art: he doesn’t bring the art in the street, but the street in the art.

Of his beginning near to the practice of graffiti remains the technique of spray paint that uses expertly to intervene directly on the faces and the bodies of fashion models. Flipping through the glossy magazines he has realized that these figures, aseptic but alive, represent for him the model par excellence to start. In each work launches a challenge with the case: the subjects are the ones that someone else has chosen for him, the poses have been carefully studied by advertising photographers of fashion.

The artist’s work, therefore, aims to return the unicum‘s aura to an object that has been reproduced in thousands of copies.  The models now appear as distant figures, surrounded by a dimension without space or time. However, through the veil of paint, Marco Rea instills personality and soul in those subjects otherwise so featureless: the eyes, dark and empty, without pupils, give  to his women an unreadable and enigmatic expression that allows the viewer to look at himself in those eyes and take possession of that portrait.

http://marcorea.carbonmade.com/

Ruffo’s art is essentially linked to the basic elements of his architectural training: design, paper and drawing. All his works actually are the result of a meticulous planning close to details, and take shape on the sheet through a delicate but incisive sign. However, they don’t retain the two-dimensionality of a table because paper, carved, gains the third dimension. The result is a stratified work, with multiple visual and semantic readings that investigate the great themes of universal history, in particular individual freedom and dignity constantly threatened by massification underway in contemporary society.

With the installation Das Chinesische Reich (2007), the artist put the attention on what that he defines “ Chinese empire”: an impressive pyramid composed by boxes of goods from China represents the power of commercial dynamics that crush workers under the weight of exploitation. Inside the pyramid, infact, was made a niche wherein a video shows the condition of displaced persons and refugees attempting to cross the frontier to escape. Complete the title a quote from the book “Gomorra” by Roberto Saviano: “Goods have all the rights of movement that no human being may ever have”.

In artworks like Youth of the Hills (2008) he expresses, instead, the contradiction that you breathe in the territories of the Middle East conflict: a swarm of beetles covers a Second World War German panzer reproduced on scale. Insects have been carved on pages of Jewish prayers without destroying the integrity of the texts, sacred in the Jewish culture, and emerge from the work as if they were released from the sand, their natural habitat. The beetle is a symbol of strong religious affiliation of the people, because of the dramatic territorial dispute.

The same theme is tackled in the exhibition Un istante complesso (2009), curated by Ludovico Pratesi, at the Centro Arti Visive Pescheria of Pesaro. Protagonists are six large flags of the states in perennial conflicts: Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hamas. The flag, Pop symbol par excellence, was deprived of color that leaves its place to a graphic texture, dense overlapping of animal skulls: aggression, violence and death, but also stratification of people in their territory.

In his last works acquires great importance the theme of freedom, becomed almost a constant in his research.
During his residence in New York in 2010, Pietro Ruffo had the opportunity to meet young philosophers and artists from all over the world, and ask them questions about the notion of liberty. In this way was born Atlas of the various freedoms (2010-2011), a real geographic atlas wherein territories and faces overlap to form an audio-visual mapping of this universal concept, inspired by the thought of Isaiah Berlin.The installation is so composed by graphite portraits of this people and their interviews that can be listened through headphones that hang from above.
In other artworks the ideal of liberty is embodied by the dragonfly, insect carved and repeated on the intere installations’ surface. Is the case with Negative Liberty (2011) and Liberty House (2011), site specific installations that, as in a baroque trompe l’oeil, transform close locations in forests, finely drawed by pencil or painted in ink wherein the observer is immersed, almost like in a secret garden.
In Revolution Globe (2011) the dragonflies are carved, instead, on a large world map in paper, evoking the individual’s liberty to move without boundaries or restrictions: a direct reference to the revolutionaries episodes of the Arab Spring, caused by the absence of individual freedoms and human rights violations.
In World Spring (2012) the artist inserts on a geographical world map, single Arabic words (democracy, tyranny, peace, blood, etc.) extracted from the slogans used by protesters during the Arab Spring. Every word, painted in gold leaf, cut and placed in relief, is framed in a geometric pattern inspired by Islamic tiles. The result is an abstract network that covers the globe and symbolically connects distant and different regions and countries. A visual and conceptual metaphor of the web, the communication tool through which new generations of Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans, Yemenis, Syrians, have been in contact to organize and disseminate the revolutionary events.