Italy is slowly reawakening after the nationwide lockdown caused by the Coronavirus emergency. While some offices, businesses and shops have already reopened, most cultural institutions are getting ready this week to welcome visitors from 18th May.
The Summer calendar of events is also restarting with the due safety restrictions and rules regarding social distancing. This means that some events may take place in new formats and locations, such as in the open air. A new exhibition by Italian artist Fabio Viale - entitled "Truly" - is among such events.
"Truly" (from 27th June to 4th October 2020) will mainly take place in the main square of Pietrasanta (Piazza del Duomo), but will also include a new installation in the Church and the cloister of St. Augustine's Church.
As highlighted in a previous post, Viale loves playing with the concept of détournement, so his classical statues are often covered in tattoos that make them look modern and vulgarly kitsch. In other cases, he employs light styrofoam to create sculptures that look as if they were made with stone, while ephemeral things such as a paper plane, a kid's soccer ball or pliable car tires are turned into eternal sculptures made of the finest marble.
Viale will bring his subversions to the main square of Pietrasanta: here people will be able to admire his classical statues covered in intricate tattoos, at times inspired by the Japanese traditions, the Trap scene or by South American motifs.
Among the new pieces subtly decorated with tattoos there is also a monumental head of Michelangelo's David ("Souvenir David"), while his works "Infinito" (Infinite) and "La Suprema" - marble sculptures representing SUV tires intertwined in an infinite loop and cheap wooden fruit crates stacked up - show how Viale transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary in his practice.
Viale will present his new pieces - "The Three Graces" - in St Augustine's Church. The three sculptures in white marble were inspired by three women from the city of Ghardaia province of Algeria, Viale met during one of his trips. In this area women wear a haik from head to toe that only exposes one eye.
Through the graces, Viale comments about two different spheres - religion and protection. The artist hints at freedom, restrictions, limitations and perceptions of beauty (the draped fabrics point at sensuality, but we can't see the persons hiding underneath - we can just imagine them and from what we know they may be humans, aliens or even divine entities), but also invites us to think about the isolation people went through during the Coronavirus lockdown.
So these masked figures become ghosts that remind us about wearing personal protective equipment and face masks in the attempt to build barriers and reduce the possibility of contagion. They also prompt us to think about physical and mental isolation and about being locked up in a lonely condition that from mere days turned into long weeks that transformed into unbearable months.
The three graces become therefore a way to think about freedom and spirituality, but also to ponder about our personal condition under the Coronavirus restrictions and they end up having a connection also with the theme of the "mulier abscondita" and the story of Silvia Romano, the Italian volunteer kidnapped in Kenya in 2018 and released last Saturday who was attacked on social media because she came back home wearing the hijab.
There is also something disturbing about these human figures wrapped up in fabric: Viale's statues aren't indeed the usual sensual and ethereally fragile graces, but they make us think about bodies wrapped in shrouds and in particular at the coffins of the COVID-19 victims and mass graves we have seen in the news in the last few weeks.
"The Three Graces" will be displayed next to Viale's "Stargate": the result of two recombined stacklable plastic boxes of the type used to carry fruit and vegetable, reproduced in gigantic size and in marble, this sculpture is a sort of futuristic architectural structure. Viale's "Three Graces" will therefore also become space travellers, crossing physical and mental stargates, portals onto new lives and a new spirituality, representing a way to escape the chains, sorrow and pain that have constricted us for so many long weeks.
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