That sculpture is the art of removing is perhaps its most classic definition, starting from the famous formula in which Michelangelo identified the act of freeing the Platonic idea inherent in the raw material from the “excess” through the physical struggle against the stone to make it obedient to the intellect. Approaching sculpture starting from processes of reduction and removal strictly connected to the physical involvement of the artist is also an essential prerequisite of the research by David Adamo, protagonist of the site-specific exhibition “A Bedtime Story” at KAPPA-NöUN, created in collaboration with Apalazzo Gallery. The instinctively Michelangelesque method of the sculptor, born in 1979 in Rochester (New York) and based in Berlin since 2008, derives the symbiosis between these two aspects not so much from the desire to free a pre-existing idea in order to make it intelligible, but from the necessity, borrowed from dance (the discipline in which he made his debut as an artist), to consider space as an organic structure. If his sculptures use various materials and techniques, the common thread that unites different series is precisely the tension triggered in the surrounding space by the act of removing and its relationship with the creative process, understood as a movement marked over time and as the application of a force to matter to transform it.
David Adamo, “A bedtime story”, installation view at KAPPA-NöUN, 2024. Courtesy the artist and APALAZZOGALLERY. Photo Carlo Favero
Whether the sculpture is a wooden beam carved to expose its intimate substance or to make its exterior a labile diaphragm between the internal and external void or whether it is the hyper-realistic bronze cast of a peeled fruit or just the peel separated from the pulp, the complementarity between what remains and what has been taken (to be removed or scattered around in the form of fragments) constitutes the essence of the object and its gravity center. It could be said that each of the artist’s works, regardless of the technique and scale adopted, has to do with the center of sculpture, which he identifies in the dangerous approximation to the limit of rupture. The more difficult and precarious the balance of the sculptures is due to the incisiveness of the removal, the larger the negative space is given over to the imagination, instigated to crowd the void with questions. David Adamo’s is therefore a psychological space where the boundary between life and work is uncertain, work being the stratified imprint of the rhythmic obsessiveness of gestures that dig systematic pockets of concavity in the space. For the artist, shaping space through one’s body means adhering to Carl Andre’s motto «shifting from form in sculpture to structure in sculpture to what I wound up with as place in sin sculpture[1]» in a sense that places emphasis on an idea of sculpture activated by interaction with the visitor, invited to sensorially participate in the visual, physical, acoustic and even olfactory experience of the sculpture. It is therefore no coincidence that one of the most recurring materials in his production is Canadian red cedar, a very fragrant wood that releases its resin aroma over time after being peeled in the sculptural process.
David Adamo, “A bedtime story”, installation view at KAPPA-NöUN, 2024. Courtesy the artist and APALAZZOGALLERY. Photo Carlo Favero
David Adamo, “A bedtime story”, installation view at KAPPA-NöUN, 2024. Courtesy the artist and APALAZZOGALLERY. Photo Carlo Favero
David Adamo defines his studio as a forest where «things go up and down, expand and grow», a place to be shaped with his physicality by putting himeself into the work. «The only way I can do it – declares the artist – is when I feel it in my bones: when I work with wood I have to let the material go inside and then I can start to find the shape from inside my bones and create something similar». And it is precisely a sort of interior forest that the artist has created in the spaces of KAPPA-NöUN, where he retreated for a period of residency to produce the works on display. The importance of conceiving the works as a reaction to space, as well as recalling his youthful imprinting as a dancer, identifies the primary roots of his production in the bedrock of the conceptual revolution of the 60s and 70s, with respect to which he places himself in a very personal point of convergence between practices such as process art, minimalism and Antiform, of which he subsumes the most similar instances. In each site-specific exhibition the venue is transformed, in fact, into an emanation of his studio, within which the sculpture is acted as a performance that builds new relationships between the objects, the space and the bodies that inhabit it. Even KAPPA-NöUN, where the artist created a forest in which the space is punctuated by bloodless heraldic creatures, is littered with clues that reveal this identification. First of all, crouched along the dividing line between a wall and the floor, a little mouse identical to the one that lives in his studio in Berlin and then, watching over the scene from above, two crows similar to those that fly over the houses in his neighborhood of residence.
David Adamo, “A bedtime story”, installation view at KAPPA-NöUN, 2024. Courtesy the artist and APALAZZOGALLERY. Photo Carlo Favero
These presences, recreating a familiar environment, function as emotional and scale intermediaries that introduce the visitor into an abstract environmental context, where six ceiling-high stone pine beams rise upwards between ultramarine blue walls, stripped of their flesh by the the ax blows of until they become labile arboreal ideas corroded by an entirely mental light. Apparently unstable in balance, they owe their new vertical gravity center to the calibrated deepening of the wounds inflicted by the artist, who thins their thickness until they are self-sufficient in reaching upwards. From one side of their line to the other, two evanescent knights face each other, whose armor has been reduced by the hammer to elegant speckled silhouettes in which the idea of the armor and the reminiscence of the person inside it are compressed into a further entity. All around, scattered on the floor, there are the residues of woodworking, each of which is the counterpart of a mark left by the ax in the beam, of whose hybrid nature it participates symbiotically. When trampled on, these piles of chips become a crackling sound carpet, the recurrence of which in David Adamo’s work underlines how for him the enjoyment of the work implies, like its creation, physical work. The blue of the walls that surrounds the sculptures, leading us to place them in an enigmatic dream forest, is a conceptual reference to the color of a display case in the armor room of the Metropolitan Museum in New York where the artist had the first intuition of competing with their form and essence. The most surprising aspect of this exhibition (and perhaps more generally of Adamo’s work) is the fact that, although the stratification of traces put forward can be traced back to the same nagging intent to undermine the structure of an object by removing its function, this process generates not a series of similar modules to be read in sequence, but an inclusive setting that places those who pass through it at the center of a lucid dream from which it is difficult to escape.
[1] https://www.artforum.com/features/an-interview-with-carl-andre-210546/
Info:
David Adamo. A Bedtime Story
29/01 – 06/04/2024
Only by appointment by contacting: kappanounart@gmail.com
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.
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