The cella was empty (La Cella Era Vuota)

 

 

Works by Paul O. Robinson   exibition Agostino de Rosa e Alessio Bortot curators   May 25 > June 5.2015 cotonificio spazio espositivo Gino Valle h. 10 > 19   opening May 25.2015 auditorium h. 17     download flyer >>     italian version >>

La forma dell’assenza: Radiografie|Dipinti|Reliquiari >>

 

website Paul O. Robinson >>

 

The Cella Was Empty & Notes on the Work

 

“But the imagination is as vast as the universe multiplied by all the thinking beings who inhabit it. It is the first come Among all things, interpreted by the first to come; and, if this last has not the soul that sheds a magical and super-natural light on the natural obscurity of things, then the imagination is a horribly useless thing; it is the first come contaminated by the first to come. Here, therefore, there is no longer analogy, if not by chance; but on the contrary murkiness and contrast, a multicolored field through the absence of a regular culture.” Charles Baudelaire

 

“…[in the dream] The secret of how to get inside of the object so as to rearrange how it looked was as simple as opening the door of a wardrobe. Perhaps it was merely a question of being there when the door swung open on its own. Yet when I woke up, I couldn’t remember how it was done and I no longer knew how to get inside of things.” John Berger: Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Invisible. 2001

 

The exhibition The Cella Was Empty in the Iuav Gino Valle Gallery explores representational relationships between identity and anonymity as a vehicle for constructing image-based and three-dimensional forms — enfolded reliquariesies¹ — that embody the evidence of occupied spaces and their artifacts while neutralizing their differences by virtue of various transformational processes.

The conceptual basis for the work partly emerges from the poetical lens of Michel Deguy, which serves to reestablish narrative content within formal artistic processes.

 

 

La Cella Era Vuota

 

Il vuoto come lo chiamano

Ma incastonato
Messo nella segreta dell’arca scavata

sarebbe l’assenza di parte per un tutto

E sottratta allo sguardo

La rinuncia ma pacatamente taciuta

Alla simbolizzazione possibile


 

In Michel Deguy’s poem The Cella Was Empty, the Cella can be sensed as a corporeal space — a present body; Emptiness, placed in secrecy within the hollowed arch. The arch is hollowed: an act of removal whose resultant liminal space enshrines emptiness. In Deguy’s Cella absence is part, an artifact held resonantly within and bound to the potential of becoming—of possible symbolization. Within the cella, renouncement is at once loss and reconfiguration and, the spirit of the imagination, provoking processes of reformation.

 

Herein the poetry is to be excavated; it lays below the surface, as do bones below the skin, transmuting a body’s morphology to an unyielding atmosphere of constant resistance, forming form; as does the cellular nature of a room in defining the identity and anonymity of a city: the mold to the molded, betwixt – antidosis². The dual is ever present, and a means for generating transformative design processes. 

 

The exhibition presents images and spatial talismans: artifacts of habitation that are in the process of reconfiguration; situated and primed for reuse. Much of the artifactual³ body – the three-dimensional objects, paintings and x-rays – emerge from months of on-site documentation within the spaces of the Jože Plečnik atelier located in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

 

Work begins with radiography in situ; spaces and artifacts are imaged using a portable x-ray device. The x-ray image bypasses recognizable – physical – attributes opening internal structures for the investment of reformed narratives. Oil relief paintings are then layered directly over the x-rays, which are then again re-imaged. The layered – enfolded – composite image is reconstituted as a mold for casting the three-dimensional reliquary. All constructions are full-scale. The reliquary does not hold the object.  There is no host space within. Rather, the original object exists only as a processual trace, enshrined as a past action; a generative muse, recomposing reliquary and object as a single indecipherable whole that projects analogy rather than mimesis. Reintroduced into a new and foreign site, the reliquaries – now interventions – import a newly charged history that serves as a material narrative connecting context to reliquaries. The dual interface between the reliquaries and their spatial context is construed as an architecture recasting the liminal – dialectical – distances between existing and foreign.

 

Here he work is dually “site specific”; it is gathered from one site – the origin – and restructured relative to its new site, the Università Iuav di Venezia, Gino Valle Gallery. It includes new work constructed specifically for this exhibit as well as work from Form of Absence, the 2013 installation housed in the Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida.

 

The exhibition – fluctuating between artistic and architectonic modalities—structures the possibility for direct interactions between artifactual and spatial narratives that (re)present themselves as a synthetic consequence: a dialectical—bodily—recasting of traces of inhabitation. The work is considered a point of manifold departures.

 

¹ The enfolded reliquary is a reliquary within which an artifact is embedded into the material content of the object rather than held within the volume of a pre-designed space. The artifact and its container are considered synthetically. A reliquary is typically seen as a vessel or container holding a meaningful artifact - a relic. The container and its contents often have no real intrinsic relationship to each other, however, the relic has meaning that escapes the container and assumes a narrative — often mythological — form in the minds of those who find the artifact important; the reliquary creates a connection by virtue of mediation. Loosely (but perhaps not so) a building is a reliquary, as is a sculpture or a painting. Analogs. All hold within their body processes (and stories) and in accordance to how they are experienced there is a potential connective space between the object and one who is present in its space. The enfolded reliquary is more a material body that reveals its content by virtue of enfolding its history, and the history of its making, until both container and object are found to be one.

 

² Antidosis is used here in the sense structured by Michel Deguy in his prose poem Timberline, dedicated to the work in Form of Absence: “The part is the whole: each of the two sides which is the whole goes back over to the other: antidosis twixt a language and a world; “exchange of a reciprocity of proofs,...”. From Isocrates’ treatise of the same title: Antidosis (literally: an exchange).

 

³ Artifact, noun: something viewed as a product of human conception or agency rather than an inherent element; Artifactual, adjective: or pertaining to an artifact and its qualities.