Revolving landscape
The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo pursues its devotion to Italian contemporary art with a solo show for the artist Patrick Tuttofuoco at his main gallery space in Turin. This is a first-time solo show at a museum space for Patrick Tuttofuoco (b. 1974 Milan), who was invited to show at the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2004, along with important international centres such as the Kanazawa Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan and the Centre d’Arte Contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland. The artist adopts a fresh energetic approach to contemporary themes in his work, reflecting a youth culture that is heavily marked by colour and technology, forever evolving into an enjoyable game of the unexpected with tinges of real storytelling and sentiment. He is mesmerised by urban landscapes and recreates them with an original edge, as if they had suddenly sprouted up out of the blue. He uses light and colour to create atmosphere and emotion in his 3D video game-style sculptures, which conserve the memory of Futurism not only because his world is one of plastics, bright colours and sharp edges but above all because his art reflects a state of being and provokes an immediate skin-deep reaction.The sculptures and installations that make up Revolving Landscape are part an exclusive project for the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and are fruit of a three-month world trip made by the artist, together with film directors Mattia Matteucci and Damaso Queirazza and the architect Andrea Pozzato. The group travelled through eighteen megalopolises (Milan, Mumbay, Udaipur, Jaipur, New Delhi, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Mexico City, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro) from October 2005 to January 2006. An incalculable amount of ideas were collected through interviews, photographs and writings during their journey, all of which build up the visual landscape of the exhibition, based on the shared memories of the group. The journey takes a route that is predisposed to the fact that only 7% of the world population today live in densely populated areas and that it is this small percentage who have the political-economical future in their hands. The artist’s journey aims to document and give a picture of all possible extreme forms of urbanisation. Visitors will be welcomed by the work entitled Revolving, a neon light that spells the word gnivlover (revolving spelt backwards), reflected on a facing mirrored wall.The Fondazione’s main exhibition space will be transformed into a vast landscape of fifteen sculptures inspired by the cities visited by the artist and by the visual impressions that characterise the urbanisation of each of the megalopolises. The sculptures will be mapped out across the space following a route of neon ceiling lights that contribute to the sensation of a megalopolis illuminated by coloured signs. On crossing the landscape, visitors will find themselves in front of a six-screen video installation spread out across the length of the exhibition space that tells the story of the group’s travels through the interviews, images and sounds that they each experienced. Instead, on the roof of the Fondazione, visitors are greeted by an old fashioned neon sign reading Luna Park Varesine (the original sign for the Varesine Fun Fair in Milan that was demolished years ago) that the artist found and decided to revive as a further sign of urban transformation.
