It is difficult to define what an image is today, even though our minds and eyes are saturated with imeges, and it is equally complex to distinguish which mysterious rules of attraction inextricably intersect with them, to the point of widely influencing our interpretation of reality and our emotions.
Andrea Nacciarriti, Installation view, barchino, chroma key, 2 bitte di acciaio inossidabile dimensioni ambientali, 2023, foto di Carlo Favero, courtesy l’artista e KAPPA-NÖUN
Images (produced and governed by algorithms, recycled, manipulated, hybridized, archived and discarded) are now an integral part of our existences and constantly mediate our relationship with reality, insinuating themselves into the most intimate folds of the unconscious. Even the visual arts, by definition founded on the creation of significant images aimed at conveying a vision of the world irreducible to verbal language, have obviously been hit by this massive irruption of digital material with uncertain and multiple authorship, with which they have had to engage in a inevitable competition to keep high the attention span of an audience increasingly accustomed to the unpredictable. The habit of the unheard, systematically solicited to elicit a reaction – the so-called engagement, which is talked about so much in social media marketing – has created a paradoxical short circuit between the desire to see increasingly destabilizing images due to their exceptional character and the progressive distancing, induced by digital devices for using images, with which we protect ourselves from the much desired effect.
Andrea Nacciarriti, Installation view, barchino, chroma key, 2 bitte di acciaio inossidabile dimensioni ambientali, 2023, foto di Carlo Favero, courtesy l’artista e KAPPA-NÖUN
Andrea Nacciarriti’s iconic installation at KAPPA-NÖUN leads us to reflect on these issues: it is an environmental intervention that transforms the collector Marco Ghigi’s exhibition space into a gigantic display device which we are invited to enter to discover the hardware behind the scenes of a digital image, usually closed to our gaze. The bright exhibition room is in fact transformed into a sort of film set by a chroma key green sheet that covers the floor and the back wall, in the center of which it is placed, in a slightly oblique position with respect to the horizon, a small wooden boat worn by time. The contrast between these two elements is immediately surprising: on the one hand the uniform bright green of the cloth associated with the abstract surface tension of the horizontal and vertical planes orthogonal to each other and on the other the infinite shades of the worn, dusty and faded wood of the exhausted punt, slightly tilted as if wanting to modestly show the spectator its helpless belly.
Andrea Nacciarriti, Installation view, barchino, chroma key, 2 bitte di acciaio inossidabile dimensioni ambientali, 2023, foto di Carlo Favero, courtesy l’artista e KAPPA-NÖUN
In itself this setup would be sufficient to represent the staging of an object, that is, that process of emphasis and decontextualization through which it acquires a sort of paradigmatic neutrality which makes it suitable for conveying a multiplicity of allusions freely interchangeable based on sensitivity subjective of the beholder. But Nacciarriti’s investigation goes deeper: the green sheet is in fact a green screen, a tool used to create image or video overlapping effects, which allows to remove the background color of the real shot and replace it with any other scenario. Leaving the artifice exposed, the artist overturns the rules of this process to reconstruct backwards a fictitious reality starting from the declared deconstruction of its digital visual identity. The result is the silent shipwreck of an image in an elsewhere that appears unattainable despite the material physicality of its constituent elements being within reach, to the point that we are even allowed to inspect it from the the interior, covering its entire extension.
Andrea Nacciarriti, Installation view, barchino, chroma key, 2 bitte di acciaio inossidabile dimensioni ambientali, 2023, foto di Carlo Favero, courtesy l’artista e KAPPA-NÖUN
The title, a technical definition that is usually found in the caption of the documentary photographs of an exhibition when it is portrayed as a whole, underlines the ambiguity of an operation that remains surprisingly balanced between two opposite instances. If on the one hand the artist appropriates, with updated materials and techniques, the most classic tautological conceptual procedures, on the other the same process, without the need for further interventions on his part, is equally effective in materializing the spectacularization of an ordinary vision. The dimension of the view is further reiterated in the loggia on the upper floor of KAPPA-NÖUN, on the parapet of which two mooring bollards have been placed (to which it will be impossible to secure the boat due to the difference in height) which act as positioning indicators to observe from a safe distance an object of vision that continues to exercise its mysterious power of attraction despite all its background being ostentatiously displayed and declared. And it is precisely this dimension of doubling that is at the origin of the disturbing effect aroused by the work, which manages to integrate without weakening them the poetic and emotional suggestions linked to the fragility of the boat with the explanation of the mechanisms underlying its transformation into an image.
Info:
Andrea Nacciarriti. Installation view
7/10 – 5/12/2023
KAPPA-NÖUN
Via Imelde Lambertini 5 – San Lazzaro di Savena (BO)
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
NO COMMENT