After FATICA N. 17 (2002) and BLAST (2013), Daniele Puppi comes back to Magazzino, gallery based in Rome, with the solo show VENTIVENTUNO. The event, curated by Valentino Catricalà and enriched by a conversation about Puppi’s artistic practice beetween the curator and Barbara London (useful to contextualize his research on an international scale), presents four inedited video-installations, all made between 2020 and 2021; years – as well known – really problematic and quoted already in the title of the exhibition.

The project, which opened last May 14^th, reflects the rhythm of the gallery spaces, where each area hosts a work, following the needs of visiting, which always provide for a close relationship with architecture. Care, the latter, appearing relevant for the correct reading of the four operations proposed here. Indeed, overall, it is precisely the space having an important role in the way the artist works with the video, subverting any perceptive convention and narrative tool, in order to reconfigure, from the fundamentals, the ways of the normal visual experience. “One of the characteristic features of Puppi’s work” – as the curator writes – “is the creation of site-specific video installations intertwining architectural space, images and sound in a drastic and disruptive sensorial experience”.

This amounts to a radical reformulation of the elements regarding the traditional video narration, as the time of the anecdote, the correlation between events and the distribution inside the screen. This feature, in different forms, between interferences and contaminations, characterizes in the four video installations substantiating the visit itinerary, letting see, so, the predominant feature of the artist’s practice, recognizable in the ability to subvert the logocentrism typical of the traditional film story-telling, giving evidence to characteristics that usually move along the side of the plot.

Among the main ones, there is the sculptural modality characterizing the way the video is worked in Les Voyageurs, where the same image is mirrored and rotated on two collimating screens, giving the impression of three-dimensionality.

In Menocchio, reproducing a subject with ambiguous anthropomorphic features, the dimensions of space and time implode in themselves, because the action is as if interrupted and repeated indefinitely, in an ever-ending way, as a loop.

With Master Blaster, on the other hand, the narrative perception of Buster Keaton’s comedy The Ball n° 13 is overturned, intervening on image and sound, that, on the contrary, is made by the artist disturbing and alienating. Finally, the author’s sensitivity changes vocabulary to Notturno, where the static horizon of a landscape crossed by an electromagnetic storm defines a condition of contemplative observation, whose plausible historical-artistic references range from Giorgione to Romanticism.

Four different artworks but all effective in the same way, showing all the transversality of Daniele Puppi’s creativity, who, while transmitting suggestions being now more perturbing and now more relaxing, keeps constant the comparison with space, a high expressive force – which comes from a deep knowledge of the means employed – and a real extensive consideration of the video medium, able to extend its domain to what exists outside the screen.

VENTIVENTUNO is open to the public until June 30^th.

Info:

Daniele Puppi. Ventiventuno
curated by Valentino Catricalà
14/05/2021 – 30/06/2021
Magazzino
Via dei Prefetti, 17
Roma
www.magazzinoartemoderna.com