
Pietro Roccasalva // Il Traviatore, 2011
soft pastel on paper on forex
30.71 x 27.56 inches (78 x 70 cm)
framed: 32.87 x 29.72 inches (83.5 x 75.5 cm)
Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
February 11 until March 24, 2012 // opening reception : Saturday February 11, 2012 // 18 h until 21 h // live performance : Saturday February 11 // 11 h until 21 h // David Kordansky Gallery // Los Angeles
David Kordansky Gallery is very pleased to announce The Strange Young Neighbours, a solo exhibition by Pietro Roccasalva. The show is Roccasalva's first with the gallery, as well as his first solo gallery exhibition in the United States. It will include paintings, drawings, a neon work, and a large-scale sculptural installation that will serve as the site for a tableau vivant performance. The performance will take place on Saturday, February 11th, beginning at 11 h and continuing until the end of the opening reception at 21 h.
Roccasalva explores the potential for art objects to become active agents of simulacrum, sites where the animate and inanimate worlds undergo profound crossing. Painting serves as the orbital center for a practice that includes sculpture, performance, and video, and that has increasingly come to represent a self-contained universe of poetic narratives and philosophical inquiries. Roccasalva has referred to his paintings as 'microchips', devices that organize an ever-expanding network of processes and allusions. Synthesizing compositional strategies drawn from religious iconography, modernist collage, and digital distortion, and skillfully rendered over months and even years, the figures in the paintings are both deeply familiar and impossibly strange. They freeze the gaze and conjure the sense that though artworks can never be fully understood, they are caught with their viewers in an endless feedback loop of exchanged signification.
The Strange Young Neighbours borrows its title from a standalone tale in Goethe's 1809 novel Elective Affinities. In the story, a near-catastrophic drowning plays a key role in uniting a young couple destined to be together since childhood. Though the onset of adulthood and its misunderstood passions temporarily drive them apart, when the girl jumps from a moving boat and the boy saves her, they finally realize that they are in fact meant to be married.
This tale is just one of the texts that inform Just Married Machine, a major sculptural installation that occupies the center of the gallery and sets the stage for a series of new paintings as well as the tableau vivant. A wooden boat suggests direct connection to Goethe's narrative, but the other objects suggest that additional processes are at play. In fact, the scene is also based on a still/still life taken from the short Pasolini film La Ricotta. Roccasalva has allowed a series of visual slippages to transform objects depicted in what is essentially a traditional nature morte into fully realized, life-sized objects: a shallow tray becomes the mandolin-shaped boat, an overturned basket becomes the hot air balloon, and heads of garlic are translated, via a humorous visual 'misunderstanding', into a sculpture that resembles a crown of toilets. The work's most profound slippage, however, takes place between genres as the nature morte is repositioned within the realm of living things. For instance, a bottle in the La Ricotta still life is reinterpreted as a woman; accordingly, on the day of the opening, an actual married couple will inhabit Just Married Machine.
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