Piazza Collicola
06049 Spoleto PG
Italia
EUGENE LEMAY – GHOST WITNESS SHADOW
curated by Gianluca Marziani
The opening of EUGENE LEMAY exhibition, is scheduled for SATURDAY 30 JUNE at 12:00 in Palazzo Collicola Visual Arts, Spoleto. The exhibition is curated by Gianluca Marziani and included in the Festival of Two Worlds’ official programme.
The Press Conference is scheduled for 11:00 at the Piano Nobile.
The Piano Nobile at Palazzo Collicola Arti Visive opens its 18th-century wings to host a new artist’s project, designed in a “sartorial” way on the domestic model of the rooms. The approach with Eugene Lemay follows the usual rules of a soft, inclusive insertion, re-created with camouflage ways that blend into the ancient without substantial changes.
Integration is the right word to capture the embrace between the nature of a noble apartment and the electrical energy of a contemporary artist. On the one hand the opulent splendour of the place, on the other the metaphorical power of Lemay, his social criticism, the monolithic harshness of the works. The apparent contrast is thus transformed into a fluid integration: now the never-aggressive fullness of the place, now the expressive essence of an art that attacks the eye, loading the rooms with an invisible, yet dense magnetism.
American Eugene Lemay (1960, Grand Rapids, MI) returns to Italy after his personal exhibition in Rome at the MACRO Mattatoio (curated by Micol Di Veroli, February – April 2015). Dimensions of Dialogue was the title of that exhibition, a phrase that well encapsulates Lemay’s ethical conscience, the political and militant nature of his work. The works at Palazzo Collicola are the stations of a journey in the pain of war, in the hypocrisy of politics, in the phobia and terror that blinds, in the wounds of the flesh and those of the heart. The American artist knows the noise of bombs, the screech of lethal weapons, the smell of pouring blood. At age 13 he moved from Michigan to Israel, passing his adolescence in a kibbutz, then becoming a voluntary soldier who took up arms and fought for Israel. A very hard experience that marked his life as an American Jew, shaping his talent as if it were a storm that shapes a mountain. There are normal lives that sometimes create extraordinary tales. And then there are extraordinary lives, without safe harbors, that are sublimated in universal works, destined for the Esperanto of the eye, to the collective dimension of natural values. Eugene Lemay enters the extraordinary of a nomadic existence, culturally fertile, impressive for its events and consequences. A life inside life, so involving that it becomes an artistic thrust, so as to produce consequences in the form of works and visual messages.
Gianluca Marziani: “I am struck by the double soul of some of the works, the ability they have to mould themselves on the individual habitats. When I saw the installations in the gigantic studio in New Jersey, I thought they breathed in silence, in a neutral environment that accepted them without conflict. Once set up in Spoleto, something completely changed in them, now they began a phase of faster breathing, as if they felt an anomalous place and tried to adapt to a habitat full of memories …”.
Phantoms, witnesses, shadows… it is them who guide us ideally along the stations of the Piano Nobile, we feel them inside the paintings, beyond the frames, among the false bombs of an installation, inside the pictorial impasto, in the monochrome backgrounds of the surfaces… Lemay crosses the evil of humanity with the metaphorical pace of art, avoiding the blackmail of realism, preferring the suspended pace of allegorical rites, of archetypal figures, of the dissolving black, of the clouding grey. Through digital elaboration and manual execution, bodies and faces are recreated that seem to have been born from plasticine, wool, steam, snow, cream… they are shadows of flesh, solid ghosts, silent witnesses of the evil suffered… Arctic and nebulous bodies, similar to white bears that embrace, bend, suffer, fall, stand up… Bodies of soldiers that could become everything we would have liked them to be… Bodies that are philosophical archetypes between Plato and Nietzsche, sometimes black like shadows in the darkness of the cave, like soldiers under a starless sky… Bodies that embody pain and the desire for rebirth, divided between a necessary evil and an even more necessary good… bodies that are ghosts on their way through the world, slow but elephantine in the heavy pace that tramples on wounded lands… bodies that seem solid shadows, eyewitnesses of collective pain… bodies that seek the light of the night, the stars of the day, the distant horizon of the events.
Gianluca Marziani: “Godot arrived among us together with the silent witnesses of Lemay. Samuel Beckett’s mysterious figure arrives among the living, blurs into the crowd of ghosts and mute shadows. He doesn’t introduce himself to anyone but we understand that he is Godot, archetype among the archetypes, witness and judge who guides humans to the edge of the abyss, stopping just before the fall. In front of the emptiness he sums up the evil in an instant, caressing the suffering Earth, asking ourselves which side we want to go to… Because evil has reached its peak and beyond that peak the black hole begins, the antimatter of existence, the end of the last Endgame. Godot accompanies us on the abyss and lets us look at the infinite emptiness but also at the light behind our backs, at the possibility of a new journey, of a plausible rebirth. The choice between the black hole and the light, between a long farewell and a long love is up to all of us…”
The exhibition ends on Sunday 7 October 2018
Info: www.palazzocollicola.it https://www.facebook.com/PALAZZOCOLLICOLA
Palazzo Collicola: info@palazzocollicola.it
Sistema Museo: ufficiostampa@sistemamuseo.it
