DATA ON IMPERFECTION

DATA ON IMPERFECTION Alessandro Bergonzoni | Gianni Moretti | Maria Elisabetta Novello A cura di Martina Cavallarin

FACTORY-ART Mommsenstraße, 27, BERLIN, 10629 (City West - Charlottenburg) 10.01 - 08.02.2013 Opening Thursday 10 at 06.00 pm

DATA ON IMPERFECTION is an exhibition highlighting those conceptual aspects of contemporary artistic experimentation where no preference is given to predefined languages but where the focus is on the reiteration of failure intended as an end and a means, on imperfection as a multiplicative and desired aspect. It is art’s duty to provide some sort of mental physiotherapy to the maladjusted and torn muscle of collective awareness. DATA ON IMPERFECTION is an effort of this kind, providing a range of broad views and necessary experimentations.

The installations by Alessandro Bergonzoni, Gianni Moretti, Maria Elisabetta Novello will be hosted in the halls of Factory Art as organisms under transformations, as bodies, figures and mutant tonalities. These become the donors of a data-laden idea – data pertaining to an order disconnected and unhinged; to that ungovernable order that is the quintessence itself of fallacious and imperfect man, which is, for this very reason, remarkably interesting. Art acts as an instrument of conscience, as a passage from the private to the public and from the public to the private; art as a system of relations and an infinite negotiation of viewpoints; art as a container and diseased carrier of DATA ON IMPERFECTION. It is necessary to place oneself on the edge of Duchamp’s infra-mince, in that imperceptible and unclassifiable zone where inhabited is the land in between, where the no man’s land must be regenerated, rehabilitated, translated, touched, seen and lived in.

Alessandro Bergonzoni unleashes with dystonic excesses a constant and ever growing will to apply the surgery of imperfection by acting on the interpenetration of life in art and art in life. He achieves this through the expansion of error, continuously crossing the weighbridge of the threshold and the zones that are residual and lie at the edge, relying on a mechanism of postproduction to activate a redemption of sorts through forms and figures, through intellectual archives, memory, materials, assembly, through spurious works that bring to the surface many possible re-emergences. His installations point to the boundless circles of existence, which is not a container with airtight compartments but a sphere of the outré where crossings are infinite and the rooms lead to other rooms in what is a mannerist process of communicating vessels where there is no centre and all is sublimated in the venue of loss. From illness to civic conscience, from ethics to shared participation, from the human to the superhuman – everything in his conceptual design converges in the aesthetic revelation of the work.

Gianni Moretti investigates organisms expanding them to near collapse. He focuses on the hypothesis of failure intended as an aggregation of proactive evidence and conditions, on a reiteration that envisages an equality that is only similar but not identical, on the space of existence that continually highlights those imperfections that reveal truth or are plausible. A specific characteristic of his artistic form is the pursuing of unfolding error and the irresistible, unconscious, will to focus on the identical false, i.e. on the sedimentation of forms, on the ability to put oneself on the line as a tightrope walker who practices without a safety net, on a lenticular exploration of materials, which are touched with the passion and delicacy of a lost lover. A false identical that contemplates different works, albeit only linguistically, the idea of relational art that multiplies itself in analyses both intimate and addressing broader social issues. His is therefore an art that is ready to expose but which maintains a state of apparent silence – an art that reveals itself through fragmentary indirectness, through paper, hesitation, obsession, refinement, mutation, poetry.

Maria Elisabetta Novello relates with fleeting and evanescent elements, materials that she encloses within transparent Plexiglas showcases or in long test-tubes with a view to creating curvilinear horizons, micro and macro cosmoses, shades so infinitesimal they can be classified or managed only with great difficulty, and therefore perennially on the verge of imperfection. Her floor installations – compositions developing in delicate patterns that echo lacework – are embroidered tattoos destined to be wiped out but whose mnemonic and organic possibilities she investigates. She is the artist of the constant dialogue with the frailness of the contemporary age; her works are nourished by overlaps and transformations arising from a reconsideration of what has already occurred. Novello readapts spent dust – the fragment of a re-emergence as well as the allegory of the feebleness of the human condition – and transforms it into something else, in a ceaseless osmosis of the past with the present, finely poised between possibility and limit, between the visible and the invisible, between the time and timelessness of the constellations of the cosmos and also of terrestrial landscapes intended as real geographical spaces and visionary places of the mind.

martina cavallarin