Frameworks_Beatrice Forchini_English

Saverio Bonato FRAMEWORKS February 3rd – March 6th 2016

Serra dei Giardini, Viale Giuseppe Garibaldi 1254, 30122 Venezia

‘To make a conversation, I spoke about the statue. I said the man wanted to stop the young woman. He had noticed something, a danger, and he raised his arm to stop her. You replied that it was the woman who had seen something.

Something marvelous, which she was pointing out. Both our theories could be right. Having left their home, they have journeyed for days. They have come to the top of a cliff. He stops her going too near the edge, while she points to the sea stretching to the horizon. Then you asked me their names. I said their names didn’t matter. You disagreed and proceeded to name them, at random, I think. Then I said they could as well be you and I, or anyone.’

(L'Année dernière à Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961)

The quoted scene from L'Année dernière à Marienbad, directed by Alain Resnais, is filmed on a terrace of a baroque palace. The narrative elaborates on the memories of two main characters, a man and a woman. In this passage, the man gets close to the woman, while she stands on the terrace in front of the gardens.

The man re-enacts a conversation that seems to have happened one year before: a dialogue regarding one of the statues of the balustrade that portrays two human figures – a man and a woman. The scene starts to change, when the camera moves away from the actors towards the statue in front of them and rotates around the stone figures. The association between the man’s tale and the shots of the statue activates a friction, at the point when the text and the images contradict one another. The narration seems to take a detour. The image of the statue is integrated into another context, like it were the apparition of a mental picture or a memory of the past.

The work Frameworks by artist Saverio Bonato features a series of 23 photographs, taken with an analog camera, a research on a group of statues installed on the upper terrace of the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza. The statues, whose subjects are drawn from Greek mythology, have been realised in the beginning of the XVII century by sculptors from Vicenza that followed Palladio in the decoration of the Basilica.

The photographs are taken at night, after a recent restoration of the building, in particular of its upper parts - the roof and the terrace. In the photographic series, the statues are shown as isolated entities, separated from the landscape. The landscape seems to have ‘withdrawn’ in the darkness and has been replaced with an homogeneous background, built up after a digital postproduction.

Captured from behind or as silhouettes, the statues are sustained by a set of steel structures that intertwine with their figures. Bonato shows the props and tools of the restoration as elements that are superimposed on the stone bodies. The metal structures – like the statues themselves, are illuminated by the artificial lights of the balustrade. In each element of the series, the structures, which are almost hanged on to the stone, create new lines that integrates the ancient form. In the work Frameworks the interest of Saverio Bonato is the relationship between the classicist form and the new one, the form outlined by the rods, bolts and bandages used for the recovery of the Basilica. The artist looks at the structures as additional stratifications of the figure and not as unrelated entities: the steel props are per se formal elements that alter the previous drawing. Within the photographic image, the classicist figures and the new structures assume the same relevance, as they can be looked at as the last and most recent phase of the statues. In some shots, the rods and bandages transform the subjects - drawn from the Greek mythology, into pierced and caged bodies and, like prosthesis, the metal structures add details to the original figure. Even if the pictures of the series unveil references to the Greek mythology – like the three Graces or Atlas that holds up the Heavens on his shoulders, the work of Saverio Bonato goes beyond a focus on the iconographic subjects and the photographic process becomes a way of staging new configurations of the elements.

Here’s the relation with Alain Resnais’ film, where the association between the text’s lines and the moving image creates a friction and opens up various levels of perception, producing a temporal and spatial discontinuity. In the quoted passage, the narrative lines and the moving images evolve in a parallel, but contradictory way: the elements differ from a minimum of marginal details to a maximum of non-coincidence. This is the case of the work Frameworks, where the gesture of Saverio Bonato is not about the recuperation of either the ancient look of the statue or the presentation of the most recent one, as more significance is given to the relationship and friction between these two entities, as an attempt to activate something outdated and to capture the perception and apparition of a time gap. The gaze is led to make hypothesis about the developments, metamorphosis or narrations regarding the subjects and the material, where the ancient trace and the contemporary one are conjoined. Through the 23 photographs, the artist makes space to a present imaginary. Starting from an interest in what has been deteriorated, he shows a ‘difference between two uncertain and incomplete things [...] between the present perception and the disappeared perception that the original artwork expresses today’ 1.

text by Beatrice Forchini

1

Marc Augé, Rovine e Macerie. Il senso del tempo, Bollati Boringhieri, 2004 (p. 26); translation by the author