New Works
Massimo De Carlo is proud to present the first solo show by Gianfranco Baruchello in its London gallery.
For his first enthralling exhibition at Massimo De Carlo the artist will premiere a series of works realized from 2013 to 2015. Delicately hand made paintings on aluminium together with box constructions and sculptures translate Gianfranco Baruchello’s witty and sophisticated narrative that encompasses a thoughtful, political and light-hearted critique of our society into art.
The exhibition begins with Interiority Complex: the sculpture in the window of the gallery that represents an open body, is key to understand how the artist’s on-going fascination for depicting and mapping the works of the mind has now, in this stage of his career, embraced a new quest. The show is structured as a journey that unveils the different stages of unravelling the relationship between the body and the brain, the exterior and the interior.
Within the first room is the series of aluminium canvases La Formula (the formule), a visual index for all works in the exhibition. The artist’s thoughts around the physical and conceptual notion of being are revealed and mapped on flat surfaces. Small figures, words, characters, tiny objects and anatomical landscapes create a new language that absorbs the gestural and guttural exploration of the innards of the intellect: for example, Time is transformed into a spiralling vortex and Thought into stylized parts of the human body and small insects.
On the lower ground floor, as a new interior-focused dimension is reached and colour slowly fades leaving space to the radicality of black and white, the gaze is invited to adjust. Murmur, the sculpture of an open specular head, is placed at the entrance of the room as an admonition to the viewer; it whispers in multiple languages suggestions of how our eyes should be used. No longer a unilateral gaze but a rhizomatic one, that mentally and emotionally embraces the nine boxes that hang on the walls.
Each box is conceived as a spatial model that encloses a world of its own, the recorded fragmentation of Baruchello’s take on different subjects, from Anatomy to History. Stratification becomes a tool that aids the decoding of the work. As put by the artist the drawings on the last layer of glass are “Ganglions, a mechanism to look at the images that are drawn on the white backgrounds of these objects. Multi dimensional indicators that suggest a series of short circuits in the opposing spaces amongst the adjacencies, superimpositions of image collocations, words and numbers”.
In every box the thoughts are mapped and portrayed around larger shapes that reminisce parts of human organs: these uncanny shapes stem by the four canvases that hang on the wall opposite the room. These four screens represent the creative thought process that generates the boxes. These are four fragments of the same narrative that tackles the monstrous power of the connections between the mind and the viscera. The soft, fluid and gangly shapes create a new system of thought that contra poses immateriality to materiality by opening a discourse on the primordial broth of thoughts and feelings that each of us takes care of.
The Artist
Gianfranco Baruchello (Livorno, 1924 - Rome, 2023) lived and worked in Rome and Paris.
In his long artistic research he has experienced and crossed the main tendencies of the Post-World War II, from Pop Art to Conceptual Art.Since the late 1950s he has used different media: painting, film, installation, objects, sculpture and performance practice. His first solo exhibition was in 1963, at the La Tartaruga Gallery in Rome: big paintings and small objects focused on the idea of formulating a first alphabet of images he calls Need, Hostility, Fear, Error, Desire, etc. In 1964, on the occasion of the exhibition at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York, he exhibited works that presented a significant point of arrival in his research: fragmentation, dissemination on canvas of images reduced to minimal elements and conceptual decentralisation of space.
From 1960 he began to produce short films, including Il grado zero del paesaggio (1963), Verifica incerta (1964-1965). Baruchello brought the very idea of fragmentation and montage to his experimentation with the painting, sculpture and moving images. In the same years he produced artist’s books such as La quindicesima riga (lines of text taken from hundreds of books) and Avventure nell’armadio di plexiglass (Adventures in a Plexiglas wordrobe). In 1962 he met Marcel Duchamp, to whom he dedicated the book Why Duchamp, published by McPherson, New York in 1985. In 1973, he started Agricola Cornelia S.p.A., an experiment between art and agriculture, which engaged him for eight years. In 1998, he set up the Baruchello Foundation with Carla Subrizi.
Baruchello’s works are part of museum collections all over the world: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and MAXXI (Rome), MoMA and Guggenheim Museum (New York), Hirshhorn Museum (Washington), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia) as well as Barcelona, Munich, Hamburg, London and Paris.