EXHIBITION n. 108
EXHIBITION TITLE: MEMENTO
ARTISTS: M. Beninati - B. Niedermair – M.E. Novello – S. Tessarollo
CURATED BY: LUIGI MENEGHELLI
INAUGURATION: SATURDAY 27 FEBRUARY AT 18.30
PERIOD: 27 FEBRUARY – 30 MAY 2010
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The end is a scandal, a painful paradox. When you believe you have grasped a hint of its sense, it has already escaped. To meditate on death is only an illusion. As the philosopher Jankélévitch wrote, "The thought of nothingness is the nothingness of thought. The nothingness of the object annuls the subject". How can we speak of something that is ineffable? How can we elaborate thoughts about what is inevitably inexpressible? And yet it is this very absence of anything visible or provable that disturbs and frightens us. It is this silent experience that produces an irreparable sensation of alienation. 

maria elisabetta novello

Paradoxical oxymorons: elegant deaths, sumptuous disappearances. Maria Elisabetta Novello's work deals with the ferociousness of a visual message that contains within itself hard work and its destruction, or the indication of a landscape made from nothing other than a deposit of ash. She embroiders, but only so that the embroidery-mandala itself can be trodden on, deconstructed, and transformed. She places heaps of burnt dust in reliquaries, but only in order to conserve the sense of the eclipse of things. She herself has said, "A constant in work after work is my search for a dialogue with temporality, memory, fragility, and unfathomable time itself". Lengthy periods of time, but also unfinished time. And at the end, after so much weaving and spinning, nothing can be understood, but those thousand "invisible corpuscles" scattered over the floor (or collected on the walls) are also loaded with history; at the same time they relate another history, yet to be seen, verified, and understood. 

brigitte niedermair

Still-lifes under limelight. Mutilated images, overemphasized, both light and rebellious, offended and triumphal. Here mutilation is not the effect of some disability, but is a privilege and glory, the glimpse of a momentary, ephemeral absoluteness. Brigitte Niedermair's photos seem surrounded by some mysterious venerability which in some way makes them privileged and inviolable. To refer to Caravaggio's rapturous light or the still light of Morandi would perhaps be out of place, because Brigitte's light is wholly her own, "always speedy", present yet fugitive. In her series Do we need all this, the objects of pleasure seem, like unbridled dictators, to impose their laws on nature and thus imply a kind of menacing or mournful experience. But violence too, at the end of the day, seems to change its signs, as though the artist wished to harmonize good and evil, the beginning and the end, pleasure and pain. 

silvano tessarollo

A poem by Celan states, "People are intent on dying". And art today seems, as never before, to underline this: except that often it ends up neutralizing the anguish of the end by making a fetish of it (as in the work of Damien Hirst). Silvano Tessarollo's skulls, instead, are invariably made from clay, ash, miserable rags, as though the material had more importance than the form or as though decomposition went beyond the iconographic element. If we look at the large-scale piece called Disegno nero 4, we come up against a landscape brought to the last stages of seeing, without depth, figures or events. It is finished, crushed, contracted. But only because what enlivens it are the skulls emerging from the depths, like bright remains, a funereal beauty. Accompanying all Tessarollo's work is the idea of inevitable transience, of sinister confusion, of the grave. And even when the images are photographed and enter into the "splendid" realm of the media, we always have the feeling of being in front of reliquaries, sinister shrines, and crystal cenotaphs. 

manfredi beninati

The studios of some artists have become part of the mythology of art history: they have become the subject of veneration, a cult, a legend. Genet, speaking of Giacometti's studio, wrote that it always seemed on the point of falling down, and Severini, speaking of Medardo Rosso's, noted that it was similar to "a space that was half a foundry and half a hangar".

Well then, the "artist's studio" built by Manfredi Beninati seems literally to embody what is commonly thought of as an artist's studio at the beginning of the twentieth century: old wood, grey dust, plaster statues, trestles, pedestals; it is a compendium of "dirty" rooms, of endless disorder, of a perennial inquisition of forms. Except that we are not dealing with a reproduction or a makeover, but with a way of restoring (and handing on) the ancient sense of making. The place is empty yet full of incomplete creatures, of precarious traces, and secret memories. However, this is not about the aesthetics of ruins but the return of something irremediably lost. 

Luigi Meneghelli