22/09 - 22/10/2019
Curated by Danilo Lo Piccolo.
Castello di Rivara, Turin.
With Niccolò Calmistro/Marco Marasciuolo, Gisella Chaudry,
Camilla Gurgone.
Castello di Rivara, Museum of Contemporary Art, celebrates the Autumn Equinox in the name of art. In this new edition, the artists, coming from different Italian cities - Turin, Rome and Palermo - are united by an empirical and scientific vision of their aesthetic research. Niccolò Calmistro, Marco Marasciuolo, Gisella Chaudry and Camilla Gurgone interacted to reveal the multiple facets of space, which comes out both in its intimate and essential aspects as well as in its external dimension, far from our consciousness, lost in the infinite cosmos. The confrontation led to Cosmos. The intimate Universe: the works in the exhibition investigate a personal and inner kosmos (in ancient Greek "order" as opposed to "chaos"), similar to the ordered and harmonious system that is used in scientific language as a synonym to define the universe in its relationships and connections, which take place in space-time and interact with our lives. […]
At the centre of Cosmos. The intimate Universe we find the artistic research of Camilla Gurgone, who describes the limits and paradoxes of mankind through an investigation of society in all its diversity. Her work starts with the urge to record her daily life and to create a story by cataloguing events, which turn out to be rich in references to contemporary society. Camilla’s works are designed to criticize but also to stimulate the public. One of her interests is the value of memory, which she replaces, recombines and reorganises to challenge, through absurdity, the everyday life we live.
By subtracting the element of reality and replacing it with fiction, the artist transforms a real-life moment into an artfully crafted one. The intimate sphere is thus challenged and the trace of what we do, what we eat, what we see or remember is reconverted through temporal paradoxes.
Gurgone's large installation, Paper Torch, clearly illustrates her work: the spectator is confronted with a structure, a closed system, created not for cataloguing and archiving but aimed at erasing everyday memories by burning thermal paper (receipts) through light. Through this practice, everyday objects are given a new meaning: household appliances that normally define our days, such as hotplates, torches or toasters, lose their symbolic value within the domestic sphere and can suggest an alternative and ironic use of the society that surrounds us.
With Gurgone LAB, the fracture between nature and artifice becomes evident: in an era where aestheticization is the only form of certainty, beauty becomes a commodity replicable in a laboratory and has less and less to do with natural imperfection. In this relational work, through food as a means of social criticism, Gurgone depicts an increasingly consumerist society, one that is willing to accept surrogates of happiness. In her LAB, Gurgone tries to stage the ideal creation of beauty. A hanging lab coat reminds us of scientific laboratories and experiments. The scientist's creatures, eight perfect berries, labelled and catalogued, placed inside Petri dishes, are the mirror of the decay of contemporary society, which is more and more desperate to experience perfect yet fleeting instants of happiness.
- Danilo Lo Piccolo
Easy and Effective! Home edition/Paper torch, 2019.
Thermal Paper, rubber flashlights with batteries, rubber wire.
Variable size, in the picture: 280x400x160 cm, private collection.
Gurgone lab, 2019.
Chalk, acrylic glazing, powdered pigments, glass, cotton.
Variable size, in the picture: 80x120x12 cm.
