Duel – Goldschmied & Chiari. Eclisse

Where and when

From

19March 2019

30March 2019

Museo Novecento

First Floor

The protagonists of the Eclisse exhibition, curated by Gaspare Luigi Marcone, are Goldschmied & Chiari (Sara Goldschmied, Arzignano 1975 – Eleonora Chiari, Rome 1971). The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the departments of equal opportunities and the environment of the Municipality of Florence.
Goldschmied & Chiari, building the whole exhibition on the idea of the “double”, chose, almost out of empathy, the painting Demolizioni (1937) by Mario Mafai.

Exhibition Hours

Summer Hours

Monday – Sunday

09:00 am

–

7:00 pm

Thursday

The fourth appointment of the Duel cycle opens to the public on Friday 15 March (until 30 May 2019), conceived by the artistic director of the Museo Novecento, Sergio Risaliti, who invites a contemporary artist to dialogue with a work from the museum’s civic collection.

The work of Mario Mafai, which testifies to the destruction of Roman buildings wanted by fascism to give a new face to Italy through the regime’s urban planning, introduces the main environment of the exhibition. Inside the room, the artists exhibit the series of collages Removal devices (2010-2012) and the large multi-material installation Patria (2010-2019).

Goldschmied&Chiari, Dispositivi di rimozione 12, 2010, collage e passepartout, 50×50 cm, courtesy-le artiste.

Goldschmied&Chiari, Dispositivi di rimozione 30, 2012, collage e passepartout, 50×50 cm, courtesy-le artiste.

The collages are made up of images taken from magazines published between 1969 and 1980; in the background there are black and white “panoramas” of tragic massacres in a dark intertwining between terrorism, deviated apparatuses and crime (from the Piazza Fontana massacre in 1969 to the Bologna Station massacre in 1980), while on the surface color clippings emerge of sexy playgirls. The girls with alluring poses take their eyes off the tragic backgrounds, which are confined to outline images.

The title Devices removal refers, in fact, to the “device” (the sexy girl) of psychological repression that captures the viewer’s gaze, eclipsing and neutralizing the dramatic backgrounds full of rubble. Precisely the rubble, this time objectively, forms the other work exhibited in the room, Patria; the construction debris composes the word “homeland” on the ground, opening an ever-current reflection on the condition of the Bel Paese.

The dusty ruins, scraps of buildings and construction sites, which make up the installation critically look at the illusory nature of national identity, recalling the reflections of sociologist Benedict Anderson on the “imagined community”. The nation, following the words of the scholar, is an imagined political community “[…] as the inhabitants of the smallest nation will never know most of their compatriots, nor will they meet them, nor will they ever hear of them, and yet in the mind of each lives the image of their being a community […] ”.

In the video Self-portrait (2009-2019) the artists dig a hole in a wood and then “plant themselves” there as new plant elements. Roots to be recovered, cyclical nature, excavation as research and memory, but also as a metaphor for artistic work, are just some of the many concepts offered by this video. The “mother earth” is confronted with the “homeland”, perhaps making us more responsible for a place of origin that we share with all, beyond national borders and beyond sovereign rhetoric.

Goldschmied e Chiari, Untitled, View 2017, stampa su specchio e vetro, 115×150 cm, Courtesy Renata.

The two Eclisse mirrors (2019), among the most recent works of the artists, take up, in addition to the technique of realization, some themes of the Untitled views series and dialogue with the other works on display, further referring to the natural datum. Goldschmied & Chiari shoot colored smoke bombs in the studio and take a series of photographs, some of which are then printed on the mirror supports, using a secret, almost alchemical technique, which totally incorporates the image. These “untitled visions / views” are open to multiple interpretations: smoke and smoke bombs, elements used by illusionists or even during sporting events and demonstrations by the police, are also “moments” of thought and soul, of dreams and memories, of a blurred memory and of a future to discover. Between polychromy and polysemy, direct and indirect allusions emerge, from nineteenth-century landscape painting to some results of abstract-informal painting of the twentieth century, in addition to the age-old metaphors of the mirror in the history of Western art. The viewer, reflecting and reflecting, is an active and integral part of the work.