Arianna Carossa at Milan’s new project space Tintoria
Arianna Carossa’s exhibition The Aesthetic of My Disappearance in Milan marks the the first chapter of a new project, Tintoria.
Tintoria mixes contemporary art and fashion, a laboratory to sprawl contemporary thoughts and contents, to match apparently distant declinations and artistic projects.
The project is in collaboration with Senatura, a Naples-based factory dedicated to man’s world, representing fashion brands Basicon, Pulchrum!, SPR by Pulchrum, and Basicon Research.
For the first issue curators and founders Geraldine Zodo and Francesco Lecci invited Arianna Carossa.
The Italian, New York-based artist works with installation, sculpture, painting, video and photography, starting almost exclusively by found objects or things produced by others, mostly focusing on interpretation. Sacred images recontextualized, deprived of their iconographical power, or simple artifacts assembled or modified, become contemporary symbols that deny an imagery only to create another one.
Carossa’s practice reflects on the object, assimilating the imagery and replacing it somewhere else, transfigured, elevated to an icon. Starting from the primary gesture of looking, choosing and juxtaposing, the artist creates pending environments, broke narrations full of tensions and subconscious rememberings.
“I made the object the central element in my artistic practice as to be part of an hypothetical resistency where I wish for the sacred to come back, avoiding contributing to physical and visual saturation, a sort of ecological ethic. Using artworks by others to create mine – as in the case of Anemic Cinema by Duchamp, Turrell’s installation at the Guggenheim, Giò Ponti’s furnitures, the Cobra Group’s majolicas – finds place in the transformation of meaning, going back to the symbol’s dimension, to Nietzsche’s illusion. My research, starting from the rescued object, pushes to the almost phobic extremes of avoiding the physical and visual overpopulation so much to deny the object/artwork physicalness, going back to the word, to the verbal sacrality, with its symbolic, metaphysical and magical corollary.
The project of not producing artworks, but describing an imaginary presence in real places, starts from here, a discourse on the denial of images and physicalness, an aesthetic of disappearance, the incipit of a silence”.
The show develops in between the new items by the fashion label, in a game where the audience is forced to get lost and discover which ones and where the artworks by Carossa are.
On display there are also copies of the book The Aesthetic of My Disappearance. The volume, edited by Blisterzine in partnership with Tintoria and Senatura, and presented for the first time in Italy, is a collection of interviews with Italian and International curators about nine exhibitions never realized, projects which took place only in the curators’ and the artist’s mind.
Introduced for the first time at the Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, The Aesthetic of My Disappearance is a limited edition of 100 copies, sold in the U.S. by Printed Matter.
Arianna Carossa, The Aesthetic of My Disappearance at Tintoria, Via Sciesa 24A – Milan through April 20, 2015
by Droste Effect
in Focus on Europe
Mar 30, 2015