Istituto Svizzero, Rome

La Velocità delle Immagini, Swiss Institute, Rome, Italy
26.10.16–21.01.17
Curated by Samuel Gross
Photo cre­dit: OKNOstudio

Istituto Svizzero di Roma pre­sents the group show La Velocità delle Immagini (The Speed of Images), a reflec­tion on the rela­tion­ship bet­ween speed, moder­nity and art. The exhi­bi­tion includes works by artists from dif­ferent per­iods, such as the Futurist Giacomo Balla and the artists Sylvain Croci-Torti, Chloé Delarue, Nicolás Fernández, Louisa Gagliardi, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Emanuele Marcuccio, Rammellzee, Manon Wertenbroek and Urban Zellweger.

While recent deve­lop­ments of online infor­ma­tion tools seem to have pushed images to maxi­mum speed of cir­cu­la­tion on a world­wide level, this exhi­bi­tion sets out, through a col­lage effect, to sug­gest that this per­cep­tion of flow and acce­le­ra­tion has already offe­red inter­sti­tial zones, for some time, which artists can legi­ti­ma­tely occupy. From the early years of the last cen­tury, Futurism paid tri­bute to speed as one of the essen­tial values of the modern age, also sug­ges­ting that the phy­si­cal obser­va­tion of its effects could pro­vide the sti­mu­lus for an aes­the­tic rever­sal.

Curving lines, brea­king up straight lines, frag­men­ting colors, Giacomo Balla crea­ted an ico­no­gra­phy of speed, pro­jec­ting pain­ting into an abs­tract kine­tic space. But the world of mecha­ni­cal velo­city and the repro­du­ci­bi­lity of images is also that of the urban explo­sion, of the expo­nen­tial increase of dimen­sions in set­tle­ments that become gigan­tic cities. The least affluent, pushed away from urban cen­ters, find them­selves dependent on mass media and public trans­port, on those objects without ori­gin that the ​“wri­ters” of the 1980s deploy to take pos­ses­sion of cities and to dream of an iden­tity that can go beyond their present condi­tion. Thus Rammellzee ima­gines an astral, retro-Futurist and redee­ming astral des­tiny, char­ged with the unful­filled pro­mises of moder­nity.

Through a strange effect of chro­no­lo­gi­cal conden­sa­tion, not far from the ecs­ta­tic and only slightly mor­bid modern hope of Balla, and from the whim­si­cal disillu­sion of Rammellzee, the ques­tions of iden­tity posed by the cir­cu­la­tion of know­ledge and the explo­sion of bor­ders and prac­tices become one of the favo­red spaces of many artists. They are no lon­ger inter­es­ted in inser­ting them­selves in a tra­di­tion, a move­ment, a field; they sim­ply want to ima­gine many fil­ters to place over the world. And so if nothing stops the images, artists do not cease to try to even more firmly esta­blish their contours, the colors and reflec­tions left behind by their pas­sage.

Artists:
Giacomo Balla, Sylvain Croci-Torti, Chloé Delarue, Nicolás Fernández, Louisa Gagliardi, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Emanuele Marcuccio, Rammellzee, Manon Wertenbroek, Urban Zellweger, Valentin Carron, Sylvie Fleury