Project Room: Marco Basta - Rainy Days
Opening Tuesday 27 November 2012 at 6 pm
Exhibition: 27 November - 16 March 2013
In the Project Room we present the young Italian artist Marco Basta, born in Milan in 1985.
His work inhabits the creek between the attempt to enclose and listen to inner, intimate space, and the need to create a gaze that can decipher and measure that chaotic external space that is reality. It is the attempt to capture something that constantly eludes us, whose meaning always lies elsewhere and can thus be established through memory, and therefore possibly through the image. The works address this everyday cognitive path, this time of waiting, this difficulty.
The idea of Rainy Days arises through striving to record and to give form to the random quality of an atmospheric phenomenon that in itself cannot be captured if not with the gaze. The drops of rain are captured by means of a scanner on which the artist breathes to create vapors and movements. The resulting image is then shifted towards different chromatic tones and then printed on different types of paper from Japan, Bhutan, Africa and Germany. The paper is prepared with a mother-of-pearl pigment on which the ink from the printer is applied. The results are translucent sheets that range from light to dark shades, similar to tones of water or the sky during a rainstorm. They could also be simply backgrounds, or landscapes. Apart from the drop of water, which remains the sole instance of representable form, the rest is simply color, sensations of a watery quality, vapors, the fluctuating movement of drops. Every sequence tries to approximate the chromatic idea of the season in which the rain was captured, using the colors that appear in that particular time. Almost a catalogue of emotions, details, fragments, hints of the personal recollection of a season.
The show will also include two ear-shaped vases, to facilitate listening to their inside, hearing of their invisible content. In the folk tradition seashells are often associated with the sound of the sea or the wind; they are thus seen as objects that convey the sound of their own origins, associated with memory. Also in the folk tradition, another marine creature with similar characteristics (as a shelter, for example), the oyster, when found in a fossilized state was associated with the idea of an ear of a non-human being. Thus it always leads back, in a way, to sound, and to an almost fable - like, mythical memory. Marco Basta has made these vases by attempting to approach some of the characteristics of the Japanese pottery known as “Mino”. The surprising aspect of this pottery is that it manages to achieve incredible beauty through imperfection, deformity, asymmetry and chance. Finding a bee’s wing is a rare event. The most instinctive gesture is to hold it in one’s fingers and to observe it from all angles. It is almost nothing, a thing that is practically invisible and exists only in reflections. Such an insignificant event can create a precious, intimate moment. In the imagery of painting the hand has always been a vehicle of “otherness”, since the offering or holding in the fingers seems almost to indicate something that is there, yet exists elsewhere.
Marco Basta has shown work in the exhibition “Vedere un oggetto, vedere la luce” at Palazzo Re Rebaudengo at Guarene d’Alba in 2011 and at Gasconade in Milan in 2012. His work can presently be seen at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan, in the group show “Fuoriclasse” curated by Luca Cerizza.