Houses, removals, broken promises. What remains when we leave? A journey back and forth in the time of memory forces us to consider which pieces we have left behind during the moving of our lives, both real and metaphorical, and what, even if we brought it with us in boxes, may no longer be able to speak the same way. A voice from the past speaks through the works on display, as if it wanted to warn us that we must be ready, at any moment, to pack up the house, to defend it with an escape plan. The wheels sprout from the sofa, the bedroom, which has become a tent with its supply of milk and cereals, is equipped with a motor. It is as if domestic affections and everyday life moments were ready to armor themselves to resist time and not abandon us, to keep that promise of solidity that is betrayed as soon as everything outside loses its center.
Zazzaro Otto, I don’t know how, but I’m taller, it must be something in the water, 2023, courtesy the artist and ArtNoble gallery
Traslochi Heimat s.r.l. is Zazzaro Otto’s solo exhibition at ArtNoble gallery, which summarizes in the three terms of the title a kind of Hegelian dialectic of the becoming of the real: the moving as the thesis, an observation on the actual; the Heimat, as its negative, as the expression of the core of belonging that pushes for immutability, and then the limited-liability company, as the synthesis of the conflict that reduces, eventually, always only to ourself. “If you need me, I will be by your side” is the comforting promise of those objects and figures, meant to reveal their miserable fragility.
Zazzaro Otto, SuperPleasureEmergencySofa (Il mio braccio per un divano), mixed media, 206 x 200 x 163cm, 2023, courtesy the artist and ArtNoble gallery
Thus it occurs in the transformation of the mat at the foot of the bed that every morning provided its welcome, into a glass panel, precariously resting on four pins. However, the panel is intact; no one has yet broken it by getting out of bed. Just as the helmets on the ground, five bronze casts, which are still in the position where the bikers who need to signal they need help placed them, on the side of the road. These dramas are not yet acted out, but stuck a moment before, in the moment of an initial awareness that wants to remain doubtful about what will happen next.
Zazzaro Otto, Complimenti per il quadro, oil on canvas, 53 x 72 cm, 2023, courtesy the artist and ArtNoble gallery
From Disney’s short film Mickey’s trailer (1938) the first three frames are extracted, repainted as oil on canvas, those of the house turning into a caravan ready to leave. About the end, however, of this situation as well as the rest in the exhibition, there is but a whiff. Have I lost you forever? Will you come with me? Where will the caravan house take us? A drawing that Zazzaro Otto found in an old family house, made by a child, perhaps not himself, is kind of the beginning and the end of these questions. It still depicts a house, made with wax crayons, faded. So another Heimat, that center of belonging that has remained there for years, is now on display in an art exhibit: testifying its endurance or its own defeat in a fate that cannot be imagined? Despite the limited-liability, the exhibition is somehow extremely collective, as in a sharing of the drama. Five helmets for five siblings; the little crayon house drawn by a ghostly child; the oil paintings delegated to other artists; the presence, felt in absence, of the lost people; the friends who wrote the texts, such as Bruno Barsanti’s È andata così, ironic close on the inevitabile.
Arianna Tremolanti
Info:
Zazzaro Otto. Traslochi Heimat s.r.l.
critical text by Bruno Barsanti
30/03/2023 – 18/05/2023
ArtNoble
Via Ponte di Legno 9, Milano
www.artnoble.it
is a contemporary art magazine since 1980
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