CORPUS.Arte in azione
Curated by Adriana Rispoli | Eugenio Viola
From Wed, 07 December 2011
To Wed, 28 March 2012

 

 

On Wednesday, January 11 at 5:30 p.m. Madre museum presents “SONO LEGIONE. Concerto per coltello, chitarra e tempesta”, a project of Davide Balliano in collaboration with Stefano Manzi and Danilo Battocchio. The performance is the second appointment of the season Corpus. Arte in Azione, curated by Adriana Rispoli | Eugenio Viola.

Davide Balliano’s research focuses on the dark side of the existence through a minimal and sometime cold esthetics which gives back deep and visionary scene. The artist explores the origin of human soul, its frailty and inconsistency . His multiform imaginative world emerges from a plurality of medias: drawing, installation, painting, performance, all forced to emphasize the irrational aspects of an alienated humanity, dominated by anxiety and obsessions .

On January 2010 Balliano presents at the Plymouth Art Center the performance “Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi”, dedicated to Cesare Pavese and titled as the unpublished collection of poems found in the poet's studio after his suicide. Standing up in front of some mirrors, the artist sharps a long knife for 14 hours. He repeats the same work with some variations at the PS1 of New York. Both actions are related to the function of this primitive, almost ancestral, sound.

Starting from these suggestions, the artist presents in Naples “SONO LEGIONE. Concerto per coltello, chitarra e tempesta”, a sort of haunted chamber orchestra, activated by the encounter/clash of three discordant elements: the archaic and nowadays unfamiliar sound of the knife grinder , the sound, closest to us, of the guitar, and then the sound of the storm, the most "natural" although artificial in its synthetic version. Different elements in which the obsessive action of the stone on the blade marks ineluctably the time, like a metronome. An action in which the musical element is developed through an experimental organization and perception, essentially anarchic and subjective.

"I like to consider the knife, the guitar and the storm as a triangle of symbols. For me the sharp knife is a symbol of obsessive and oppressive thinking; the guitar is an action made for expressing and sharing the feelings; the storm is a symbol of life and time, of all the bonds that are above us and constantly influence our lives and our choices. " (DB)

Davide Balliano (Turin 1983), lives and works in New York. His solo show “Se Solo Avessi Mani Da Mordere” recently closed at Codalunga, Nico Vascellari’s exhibition space (Vittorio Veneto, Treviso). He has exhibited at Location One in New York in 2011 at the Kitakyushu Biennale in 2007 and has presented “The Heart Of Your Mother For My Dogs”, curated by Marina Abramovic, at the Artists Space in New York in 2009. He realized performances at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, at the Watermill Center of Robert Wilson, at the Plymouth Art Center. He has also won the 2010 AOL Award and was recently included in the prestigious Kempinski Art Program.

 

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