The exhibition Depotenziare (To weaken) at C+N Gallery Canepaneri in Milan is Roger Hiorns’ second solo show in Italy. Curated by Tom Morton, the exhibition is a provocative act aimed at reflecting on how power relationships can be resignified by depowering them. The artist is interested in how power relations influence relationships with other human beings.
Roger Hiorns, “Depotenziare”, installation view at C+N Gallery CANEPANERI, Milano
From this consideration comes an exhibition with a reflective construction, in which Hiorns proposes small canvases painted with copper sulphate, acrylic and latex paint (the first reference is the Clearing series, 2024) representing a crystallised and therefore fragile imagery: a scenario derived from the representation of sex scenes between men, immersed in a kind of amniotic liquid, recalling the vital power of sexuality. Next we find Pathway (2024), a photographic work transferred onto canvas, the image of which immortalises Catholic fundamentalists outside counselling centres for voluntary interruptions of pregnancy. On the placards held by the activists we can read the phrase ‘Prayer is not a crime’. In this work, this element is seen in a sarcastic key, since according to the artist, praying is not a crime of opinion. Prayer in their case is the pretext for an intimidation carried out outside these centres, which to all intents and purposes is an operation inscribed within the recognised power.
Roger Hiorns, “A Clearing”, copper sulphate and acrylic on medium latex, 80 x 60 cm, 2024, courtesy C+N Gallery CANEPANERI
On one side of the gallery there is the work Depression (2024) consisting of two polystyrene containers originally used to store the organic matter of cows in slaughterhouses (mainly the animal’s brains are collected). The organic residue is left at the bottom of the container as if it were paint, as if to leave a mental and organic trace in this cavity. The title refers to depression as mental illness, and how it excavates a void whose footprint remains at the bottom for a long time.
Roger Hiorns, “Untitled”, image emulsion on canvas with copper sulphate, 36 x 40 cm, 2024, courtesy C+N Gallery CANEPANERI
Passing through the first room, we enter a dark space in which the black and white video of Hiorns’ artistic operation, A retrospective view of the pathaway, is projected, extensively narrated in Alessandro Rabottini’s critical text entitled La logica estrema della scomparsa (The Extreme Logic of Disappearance). The British artist’s work is an example of the sculptural disappearance of a real and functional object from the world, an artistic modality that follows a series of past examples by Piero Manzoni and other conceptual artists. In 2016, Roger Hiorns buries a disused military aircraft in a farmland in the Suffolk region of England: it will be the first artistic operation that will lead a series of other disappearances: in the Czech Republic in 2017 and in the Netherlands in 2021, again hiding war jets. The video is an aseptic, unceremonious shot in which the only sound present is the noise of machinery moving earth. The bulldozer moves earth in a sterile, precise manner, almost as if it were a suregery. As introduced before, colours are not present within the representation, in which a digital filter has been applied to express a photographic effect of solarisation. This video is as if it were representative of a parallel reality, in a dream world immersed in an amniotic fluid that weaves relations with the real world.
Roger Hiorns, “Depotenziare”, installation view at C+N Gallery CANEPANERI, Milano
It is through this continuous metaphor that can be traced back to the concept of birth and is synonymous with relationships with others, that the artist sets up his work, involving the viewer in a flow of fragility, both in works where a sexual matrix is evident and in those focused on broader and more complex themes, such as video. This liquidity is not negative within Hiorns’ practice, as if to consider this immateriality an important concept to connect the vital flow of social relationships to which the artist gives importance, proposing a social reflection that has contacts with the oneiric, and through this abstract concept arrives at the deepest themes of his practice.
Info:
Roger Hiorns. Depotenziare
curated by Tom Morton
14/11/2024 – 14/01/2025
C+N Gallery Canepaneri
Foro Buonaparte, 48 – Milano,
www.canepaneri.com
Giulia Elisa Bianchi (Varese, 1998) is an emerging curator and author. After the First Level academic diploma in Disciplines for the Valorization of Cultural Heritage at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, she decided to follow her interest in contemporary art at the two-year specialist course in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at New Naba Academy of Fine Arts. She considers curating “a writing of spaces and a way of valorising the expressive needs of the artist”.
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