Nicht Versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt, wo Gewalt herrscht
Non riconciliati o Solo violenza aiuta dove violenza regna
Opening Wednesday, October 26 - 7 p.m.
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents a personal exhibition of works by Andrea Salvino. The artist is exhibiting a selection of forty small and medium-sized works on paper produced over the last few years. The selection provides an overview on his recent production, which is characterized by variety in style, technique and iconography, but is also coherent in building a narrative that weaves together private and collective, real and fictitious stories, often with a strong emphasis on time. Some drawings are directly inspired by well-known images, famous people and widely known stories from historical events or movies, forming a big fresco, often charged with violence and yet normal, in so far as it reflects our everyday imagery: the legendary General Rommel, the Parisian May of 1968, the eroticism of Brigitte Bardot and the pornography of Vanessa Del Rio, the tragic demise of terrorist Andreas Baader, a map of the city of Berlin, a Pasolini film featuring Totò, a young Balilla fascist, Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad, and scenes from the urban guerilla in Italy during the socio-political turmoil of the so called Anni di Piombo (Years of Lead).
Overall, these works are a fascinating trip into the world of the image, and its relationship with society, politics, life, and above all with the sphere of emotions. Although they are recognizable, even worn-out from having been repeatedly used, these images are still capable of eliciting reactions, even strong ones - they make us think, they make us remember. This is the most important question Salvino is asking through his drawings, which are immediate and dense at the same time, characterized by a sign that rapidly marks paper and forms multiple layers on it: what sort of power do images exercise over us? How do they travel from one time to another, from one place to another, from one gaze to another? How is the power of a sign exhausted, and how is its communicative power reactivated?
While in his previous work Salvino had always addressed these issues through a more immediate, literal, markedly political imaginary, using the themes of violence and political struggle to illustrate a militant stance, his current work, presented in this exhibition, reflects a more reasoned, wide-ranging attitude, where the status of the image, its (broadly speaking) political nature, is the protagonist.
Salvino's exhibition, whose title, in German and Italian, is a quotation from a famous Straub-Huillet film from 1965, was created in connection with a publishing project, an artist book produced by Nero in collaboration with Milan's Galleria Antonio Colombo. The book contains a wider selection of drawings by Salvino, along with multiple archive documents that were a direct or indirect source for the artist's work. The book will be presented as part of the exhibition opening.
Andrea Salvino was born in Rome in 1969 and currently lives in Berlin.
Some of his personal exhibitions include Il disprezzo, Fondazione A. Olivetti, Rome, 2001; Donne facili, Corvi-Mora, London, 2003, Antagonista, Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea, Milan, 2005.
He was fetured in many group exhibitions, among them Exit, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin 2002, Absolut Generation, Extra 50 section of the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003; I nuovi mostri, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, 2004; Post Notes, ICA London, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2005; Apocalittici e integrati. Utopia nell'arte italiana di oggi, Maxxi, Rome, 2007; Imágenes latentes, Galería Fúcares, Madrid, 2008; Italics. Arte italiana fra tradizione e rivoluzione 1968-2008, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, MCA Chicago, 2008; When in Rome, Istituto italiano di Cultura, Los Angeles, 2011.
