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.
Artista
Gianfranco Baruchello (Livorno, 1924 - Roma, 2023) ha vissuto e lavorato a Roma e a Parigi.
Nella sua lunga attività di ricerca artistica ha conosciuto e attraversato le principali tendenze del secondo dopoguerra, dalla Pop Art all’Arte Concettuale. Ha utilizzato, dalla fine degli anni Cinquanta, diversi media: pittura, cinema, installazione, oggetti, scultura e pratiche performative. La prima mostra personale risale al 1963, presso la galleria La Tartaruga a Roma: grandi tele e piccoli oggetti si concentravano sull’idea della formulazione di un alfabeto di immagini che lui chiama Bisogno (tradotto da Il Need), Paura, Energia Errore, Entità Ostile, ecc. Nel 1964, in occasione della mostra presso la galleria Cordier & Ekstrom a New York espone opere che presentano un significativo punto d’arrivo della sua ricerca: frammentazione, disseminazione sulla tela di immagini ridotte a minimi elementi e decentramento concettuale dello spazio.
Dal 1960 inizia a produrre brevi film, tra i quali Il grado zero del paesaggio (1963), Verifica incerta (1964- 1965). Baruchello ha portato l’idea stessa di frammentazione e montaggio nella sua sperimentazione con la pittura, la scultura e le immagini in movimento. Negli stessi anni realizza libri d’artista tra cui La quindicesima riga (righe di testo prelevate da centinaia di libri) e il libro Avventure nell’armadio di plexiglass. Nel 1962 conosce Marcel Duchamp, al quale dedica nel 1985 il volume Why Duchamp, pubblicato da McPherson, New York. Nel 1973 avvia il progetto Agricola Cornelia S.p.A., un esperimento tra arte e agricoltura, che lo impegna per otto anni. Nel 1998 ha istituito, con Carla Subrizi, la Fondazione Baruchello.
Ha più volte partecipato alla Biennale di Venezia (1976-80, 1988-90, 1993, 2013) e a Documenta di Kassel (1977, 2012). Le opere di Baruchello fanno parte di collezioni museali di tutto il mondo: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e MAXXI (Roma), MoMA e Guggenheim Museum (New York), Hirshhorn Museum (Washington), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia) e anche Barcellona, Monaco, Amburgo, Londra e Parigi.