Remember Tomorrow is an exhibition about «tomorrow» as the result of actions carried out yesterday. It looks to the future and its «posthuman» thinking, as the result of a concern about the relationship with others, introjected over the last few years by artists and translated into different expressions.

Stepping back, the exhibition Remember Tomorrow, currently running at the Hub/Art gallery in Milan until 15 May, originated in 2020. The occasion was the prestigious Art Rights Prize, an international virtual art competition organized by the cultural association AB Factory to support emerging and established artists during the lockdown period. On that event, the selected artists had the opportunity to exhibit some of their works in a virtual 3D exhibition on the LIEU.CITY platform.

Later, Hub/Art, as a partner of the event, selected six artists to hold a physical exhibition at its space in Milan. In the «painting» category the names were: Giotto Riva, Federica Poletti, Agata Treccani and Paolo Treni; in the «video art» category the artists Alex Frost and Fabrizio Narcisi.

Physical presence, with its lights and shadows, is the pivot on which Remember Tomorrow is based, an exhibition that begins its process of elaboration and study in the silence of the virtual environment, in a slow and solitary process marked by digital conversations with the artists and characterized by the word «introspection».

The works selected to be displayed suggest a reflection on the discomfort of contemporary civilization, an echo of Sigmund Freud’s theses, and offer an interpretation of concepts such as imprisonment, solitude, and suspension, which have become the evils of our society.

It is from the concept of «isolation» that Agata Treccani’s work is inspired. In Podseries she takes us into a world that has assimilated the function of headphones. In the series, she places us in front of people who we observe but who do not observe us, being sensorially and mentally in an «elsewhere».

The beginning of a new existential condition is instead the focus of Alex Frost’s reflection, whose video Wet Unboxingsuspends the compulsive consumption of food and objects, removing its gravity. Man, or what remains of man, keeps his distance, does not get involved, not even in his own means of subsistence. Is it possible that by feeding on images, they are enough for him to survive?

Fabrizio Narcisi’s screens reveal a hypnotic seduction. Frightened, blind, and furious figures shake us into feelings of fear, isolation, and anguish. They remind us of Francis Bacon’s studies, long criticized as «irredeemably horrifying», because of their half-animal, half-human anatomy, hard to classify.

Federica Poletti’s work is marked by melancholy. Drawings and acrylics, in small and large formats, in which we find subjects surrounded by mystery, hidden in the dark colors, as well as in the vegetal details that envelop and protect the bodies, in contrast with the livid color of the figures and the dark color of the background. Hostages to themselves and perhaps unable to listen to the call of nature.

The hint of a condition in which the individual is torn between two opposites, between Good and Evil, is at the center of Giotto Riva’s objective. The artist reproduces contemporary society in a classical key, extracting beauty from evil, appropriating those Artificial Paradises by Baudelaire where wine and smoke multiply the individual and the taste of descending downwards, into a paradise of occasions, surrogate and rarefied in a dark and elegant atmosphere.

Light and perceptive ambiguity are at the heart of Paolo Treni’s creative process, which combines technology and craftsmanship. In distinct phases, he alternates the freedom of freehand drawing with the precision required using computerized machinery such as lasers. From a conceptual point of view, with his Simulacra Treni offers us his idea of liquid modernity that appears and disappears in a perpetual alternation of light and shadow.

The exhibition tries to create opportunities for discussion that go beyond censorship and boycott and provide space for the exercise of the doubt.

Greta Zuccali

Info:
Remember Tomorrow / Collective exhibition
9/03/2022 – 15/05/2022
Hub/Art Gallery
Via Privata Passo Pordoi 7/3 – Milan