- Exhibition program
- Cycle: Psychodrome
- Author
- Tor-Magnus Lundeby, Ugo Rondinone, David Renaud i Hugues. Reip com a convidat especial.
- Dates
- —
- Curated by
- Grazia Quaroni i David Renaud
The last stage of Psychodrome, a journey through disturbance of vision, of perception, of consciousness, expressed with all possible sensory media, not striking visual and colour effects. Today repetition is the closest contact point of all the contemporary artists represented at Espai 13, after having seen, over the months and different stages, a parade of hypnosis, vision, connection and confusion of the senses. Repetition/variation has always been a winning combination with a guaranteed disorientating effect. The obsessive and obsessively repeated motif is one of the outstanding and most immediate components of the psychedelic effect, because it alters space, sense of proportion, dimensions. Here the most diverse means of expression have come together: video or painting, volume sculpture or sound installation, real or constructed images; here is a fine example of how contemporary artists can unfold or conjugate an artistic problem in a thousand different ways, all interesting to the visitors' eyes, ears, etc. The loop, the circle, whether vicious or linear, is one of the key words of the century, a language that comes from video but can be extended to all artistic practices. That is where the territory of the infinite enters into a circle; it is the ground where the ends meet and that same space can be perceived as infinitely large or infinitely small, enveloping or boundless.
Tor-Magnus Lundeby (Fredrikstad, Norway, 1966, lives in Helsinki, Finland). The subjects of Lundeby's video installations take the most disparate worlds as their starting points. From video games to astronomy, from record covers to maps, anything can be a pretext for the construction of a new universe, a fantastic cosmogony. His paintings are hidden in two dimensions, sometimes giving the impression that they are maps, like a new territory waiting to be discovered or explored, or like a comic strip in which the unreality is deliberate. His installations often refer to the universe of music, dj’s, club culture, 45 rpm. Driven by a wish to abolish the boundaries between the disciplines, Lundeby draws a large part of his imagination from that universe.
David Renaud (Grenoble, France, 1965, lives in Paris). David Renaud's work, which was on show at Psychodrome 01, concludes the route, ends the tour. If a hypnotic valence was at the base of the revolving paintings we already know, today the eye is confused by the enveloping motif of the wall that completely transforms its surface: cell or satellite, sidereal images or infinitesimal globe, we do not know. Here microscope or macroscope become two blending and by no means antithetical concepts. The basic motif is a restricted zone which is juxtaposed and repeated until it takes over the whole space. We do not know if it is a fantasy that springs from behind the eye or a coded artificial representation of nature in the cosmic or biological field. The spectator will decide and that freedom of his is an important factor in the work.
Ugo Rondinone (Brunnen, Switzerland, 1963, lives in New York and Zurich). Through all kinds of artistic techniques, video, painting, sound, often mixed in a single work, Ugo Rondinone presents a universe which has been described as hazy, exciting, circular, fragile, transitory: all of those elements are essential to a fully lucid muddling of tracks. The visitors here must reckon with a small motif and a repeated, broken up image, but most of all with the pure contradiction of circular paintings with concentric rings: we had seen that already in Delaunay or in Rauschenberg, but here the contours are imprecise, out of focus. An imprecise target: and if, as the French critic Michel Gauthier says, all works of art are a target for the eye, here the eye and its functions are put to a severe test and constrained to find a new way of looking. Mission accomplished.
Hugues Reip (Cannes, France, 1964, lives in Paris). A video work by this French artist is a special guest at Psychodrome. This is Toon (<
Grazia Quaroni
May 2003
