Creativity and Research
in Arts and Media
CREAM On Madness
Special exhibition within OPEN 11 International Exhibition of Sculptures and Installations
Curated by GLORIA VALLESE
San Servolo Island, Venice
27 August to 28 September, 2008
OPEN 11 International Exhibition of Sculptures and Installations
Venice Lido 27 August to 28 September, 2008
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Martin-Emilian Balint, Nebojša Despotović, Giacomo Roccon, Barbara Taboni, Cristina Treppo, Giuseppe Vigolo, Dania Zanotto
CREAM (Creativity and Research in Arts and Media) will participate to the eleventh edition of OPEN, the international exhibition of sculptures and installations held yearly at the Lido of Venice, Italy.
CREAM (www.artcream.it) was founded in 2007. Its members are young artists who were trained or are finishing their art studies in Venice.
On Madness consists in seven between paintings, sculptures and audiovisual installations placed in the garden of San Servolo Island, and focusing on the theme of folly and its care, in relation with the history of this former monastery-hospital surrounded by a vast garden, which was from 1725 until a few decades ago the asylum of the alienated of the town of Venice.
In Shadows of war, Giuseppe Vigolo scrolls on the buildings, on the other works of art and on the visitors’ dark moving silhouettes of aircrafts, helicopters, ambulances.
In Sleep out, Cristina Treppo places in the garden seven bed/cages which in their seriality and in some other features recall psychiatric hospitals, inspired to archival images and relics relating to the history of madness.
Giacomo Roccon’s Now, a group of eleven life-size sculptures conceived in ideal relationship with the clay army of Qin Shi Huang Ti, is a small platoon of children-soldiers, atrociously marked by darkness and destruction.
On the links between madness and mysticism investigate, in different ways, both Barbara Taboni and Dania Zanotto. In Lustral, Barbara Taboni elaborates two elements of the environment, the sea waves and their sound, while minimal sculptural elements (two dummy legs kneeling beside a Gothic window, part of the real architecture) create a vague reference to the iconography of the Annunciation.
Dania Zanotto places under a large group of trees a “shamanic” village (Tracce): a group of tents that appear to have been built by men in intense communion with nature, but now empty and silent, animated only by the light wind, in ideal dialogue with the former community of the patients of the island.
Anti-lulling field, the hypnotic field of red poppies by Martin-Emilian Balint, is composed of 1312 red plastic flowers larger than life; as the visitor approaches, the poppies at the centre of the small plantation sway, to recreate the sudden anxiety and fear that we experience when we perceive movements in the midst of high vegetation.
The madness as a method, adopted deliberately to undermine the world of ideas that we know and to deflagrate it, is at the basis of FIRE (2007), large canvas by Nebojša Despotović, whose wild visual nonsenses, paradoxes, ironies and deformities tear to pieces the world that we normally have under the eyes.
The show closes on the special project Straitjackets: seven straitjackets made out of jeans tissue, elaborated and worn by the artists.
The seven straitjackets in jeans, a fabric symbolic in itself, have been expressly designed by the fashion house RJC of Verona, Italy, sponsor of the exhibition.
Conceived and curated by Paolo De Grandis, co-curated by Carlotta Scarpa and held in collaboration with the Department of Culture of the Venice City Council, OPEN 11 exhibits about fifty works among sculptures, painting and environmental installations, situated outdoors, in the unique setting of Venice Lido during the Film Festival.
The Island of San Servolo, a few minutes of boat from the Lido, is incuded this year for the first time in the exhibition circuit.
The board of curators of OPEN 11 includes Chang Tsong-zung, Enrico Pedrini, Nevia Pizzul Capello, Anna Caterina Bellati and Gloria Vallese.
