The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents Stefano Arienti, in collaboration with the Rome based institutions DARC (General Direction for Architecture and Contemporary Art) and MAXXI (National Museum for 21st Century Art), where his solo show was presented from 5 November to 6 February 2004.The Turin edition represents an amplified and renewed version of the show and the artist himself will install the works making them site specific for the Fondazione’s Turin exhibition space. La corda di carta di giornali (Newspaper rope) will become a huge-scale installation piece, as will the images and strips of material for the piece Oggi sposi (Just married), which will line the walls of the main exhibition hall.Arienti will also mark his return to the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo by showing the piece Colonna per uno stilita (Column for a stylite) that was featured in the exhibition Murazzi dalla Cima in collaboration with the Fondazione in 1996 where several of his installations lined the banks of the River Po. His first monograph, edited by Angela Vettese, was also produced by the Fondazione the following year.The exhibition offers a major insight into Stefano Arienti’s artistic research and production and on this particular occasion, Arienti (born in Asola, Italy in 1961) confronts the many issues connected to ‘the way we see things’. Convinced that artistic practice can contribute to the awakening of perceptions that are normally sedated by overexposure of the day to day stereo-typical stimulus that we are subject to, he turns to the spectator and involves him/her in an independent, critical and conscious mental process.Active since the mid eighties, Arienti utilises and manipulates everyday materials, experimenting original techniques and methods every time he makes a new work of art: by folding, perforating or burning paper, erasing texts and images, tracing photographs and patterns he lets the viewer into his world ruled by the apparent repetitiveness and childlike simplicity in his work.The exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo comprises more than 60 works, including Copertine Italiane, Il tempo considerato come una spirale di pietre semipreziose (Italian Covers, time considered as a spiral of semi-precious stones - comprising books and collages on books), Oggi sposi (just married – consisting of a collection of wedding announcements, posters and banners hung for newly-weds from all over the country), as well as his Puzzles, Plasticine Fingerpaintings, Perforations and Turbines to offer an indepth look into the work of this artist who experiments the each and every potential of any material he decides to work on.Visioni dall’interno (Visions from the inside) - parallel to the exhibition, a series of talks with different art critics, who will all discuss the professional development of an artist of their choice in great depth.
