The last and textual words spoken by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe before his death give the title to the next exhibition at Casa Masaccio | Center for Contemporary Art which opens on 30 October 2021 .
The concept of light has been a fundamental element of the history of art, as well as an essential means for the vision and transmission of colors in space and since the 1960s, it has become an integral part of the expressive language of art. . The journey of light has very remote sources, it has passed through myth and metaphysics, theology and art, becoming secularized in our daily life, trapped in our control and in our operations. Becoming the material of our objects and the object of our work, it asks for a different perception of the world, a different bearing of the body, a much more liquid boundary between inside and outside.
The exhibition brings together a group of artists of various nationalities and generations - Alberto Garutti (Galbiate, Lecco, 1948), Alfredo Jaar (Santiago de Chile, CL, 1956), Ann Veronica Janssens (Folkestone, UK, 1956), Joseph Kosuth (Toledo , USA, 1945), Daniele Milvio (Genoa, 1988), Kaspar Müller (Schaffhausen, CH, 1983), Michel Verjux (Chalon-sur-Saône, FR, 1956) - whose works presented in Casa Masaccio focus on perceptual phenomena and on the idea that light itself can be both subject and matter of art.
Alberto Garutti's intervention consists in disseminating works from the series "What happens in the rooms when people leave?" (1993-2021), in which the artist appropriates fragments of domestic memory and materials of everyday life to continue his subtle critical analysis of the exhibition systems.
Also on this occasion, the contributions of Alfredo Jaar , the undisputed protagonist of today's art, incorporate issues that concern socio-political issues and question the meaning of struggle and participation, of political and social commitment, urging awareness and responsibility towards the world. and what happens.
In the practice of Ann Veronica Janssens, the main objective is to investigate the perception of reality by dematerializing it through various means, mainly with light. Since the end of the 1980s, his work has in fact developed based on natural optical phenomena of light and color. The artist always experiences the distinctive features of carefully chosen materials, shapes and light, making them interact with our perception of reality, to create a recurring vocabulary of minimalist motifs.
Joseph Kosuth, one of the pioneers of conceptual art and installation art, starting from the 1960s has created works based on language and strategies of appropriation; for an exhibition dedicated to the memory of Daniele Del Giudice, one of the greatest Italian writers of the second half of the twentieth century, his speech addresses the problem of time through a multiplicity of references to other authors, thinkers and writers. In "Quoted Use" (2019), the artist ideally appropriates personal and everyday objects that belonged to influential writers and cultural personalities including Jane Austen, Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, Charles Darwin, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Einstein , Søren Kierkegaard and Virginia Woolf.
Kaspar Müller also on this occasion confirms his act as a “bricoleur”, transfiguring the design codes of the furnishing accessories delegated to interior lighting, subverts them through minimal variations, inventing other objects. The flow of meanings commonly attributed to this type of elements works together with images, icons and constellations of symbols to develop a single device that expands over time and space to suggest alternative scenarios of dispersion and subsequent energy recovery. For - “Mehr Licht!” - , Kaspar Müller specially conceived “Tree of lights” (2021) a work that moves between sculpture, design and art in a functional context.
The work of Daniele Milvio it is based on a wandering iconography that has no origin in formal speculation, but is born and takes shape in the almost daily practice of drawing. For the exhibition at Casa Masaccio, the artist presents "Testaments were made throughout the city" (2016), a bronze placed in the "noise" of the building, designed with the intention of creating a sculpture that is difficult to date, but which in reality it turns out to be a hypertrophic oil lamp whose iconography refers to motifs from the first half of the 17th century.
Those of Michel Verjux, rather than interior spaces, they are “interior bodies”, similar to biotic luminescence, different from pictorial luminism, from light sculptures subject to simple contemplation. Their topology makes them thresholds of invitation to perceptive transits, indexes of the link between energy, concept and underlying matter. The French artist's “éclairages” consist in fact in pure “light”, they project artificial light onto the sun, they glaze as they illuminate.
- "Mehr Licht!" - is dedicated to the memory of Daniele Del Giudice (Rome, 11 July 1949 - Venice, 2 September 2021), whose essays contained in the volume "In questo Luce" (Einaudi, Turin 2013) accompanied the progress of this exhibition.
- "Light our things, light our weapons, light our communications, monitors and computers - memory that becomes light - [...] '