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It seems that painting is always in the spotlight. Many times his death was discussed and many more times his rebirth was remembered. But the truth is that this discipline seems to withstand all the attacks. Investigating its contemporary limits and possibilities is the objective with which the Turin OGR inaugurated Cut a rug into a round squareexhibition curated by artist Jessica Stockholder (Seattle, 1959) with works from the collections of the ”la Caixa” Foundation and the Fondazione per l'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT.
It's a storm designed to be felt and enjoyed in person, despite the restrictions caused by the pandemic. The OGR is not the white cube that contemporary art galleries have accustomed us to, but an industrial space (trains were repaired there) where its original appearance remains. Although several exhibitions have been held there, none, to date, have revolved around painting. Therefore, “they accepted it as a challenge”, comments Nimfa Bisbe, responsible for the Art collections at the ”la Caixa” Foundation and who gives us the keys to this exhibition. To carry out the project they needed “someone who dared to do something different”, and they soon understood that it had to be an artist who proposed the installation.
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“Jessica Stockholder has a very expanded concept of painting. Furthermore, painting today is somewhat hybrid. There are works that come close to sculpture or even pictorial photography. Shareholder contributed with the quality of talking about painting in more current terms, as a multifaceted medium”, says Bisbe. In fact, this exhibition is close to a large immersive installation with works by artists such as Vito Acconci, Aurelio Amendola, Edward Ruscha, Robert Mangold, Pedro G.Romero, Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Marlene Dumas, Richard Tuttle, Tracey Emin, Diego Perrone or the shareholder itself. “It has been very respectful and the works maintain their own identity. Some of them are even seen differently”, adds Bisbe.
There are exactly 10 works that the Shareholder selected from the collection of the “la Caixa” Foundation. Some are by well-known artists, while others are by Spanish creators unknown in Italy. From Francesco Clemente, for example, he chose a fresco that the Foundation acquired in the United States and that has not left Spain since its arrival in 1980. It was only exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao on the occasion of an exhibition that brought together 6 of the artist's frescoes. Stockholder delved into the two collections and from the Spanish entity's funds chose a “figurative painting by Pérez Villalta that surprised us with its concept of the discipline”, explains the person responsible for the collections.
To select the pieces, the artist focused on two geometric figures: the square and the circle and how they are related in most paintings: “the square as rational and the circle as a less stable and more mobile aspect”. In this game, he placed two Richard Tuttle pieces on pyramid walls that must face each other and decided that each of the walls is a different color. “I am investigating how the generally rectilinear geometry inherent in the contour, or edge, of paintings generates meaning within and without them.”explains the artist herself who has, until March 6, a solo exhibition also open in Madrid, at the Max Estrella gallery.
While exploring the backgrounds, he observed the presence of these two geometric figures and then began to “think of the representation of the human body as a kind of circle inscribed in a square, as in the Vitruvian man by Leonardo da Vinci. The paintings themselves are generally characterized by a rectilinear geometry. What happens inside the screen puts pressure on the edges. The edges are literal and abstract and are defined by the tip of the material support, but the rectangle, which identifies itself as a map, is understood by virtue of abstraction”, he indicates.
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Ultimately, an environmental installation that evokes in an experiential way the clash between the circle and the square as an image of the productive clash between rationality and imagination, order and superabundance, body and idea. “I believe that Stockholder was looking for a constant to establish a discourse and found that in many works there was this relationship, but sometimes it is very subtle. For example, the painting by Marlene Dumas is a figure that opens its arms and seems to draw a circle and puts it next to an Italian photo where we see a circle. O la pieza From 9 to 5 of Ruscha that takes us to the clock, to its circularity and our working day”, explains Bisbe.
In this exhibition the artist seeks the activity of the spectator, who walks and focuses on the details of each piece. For him, Stockholder has built a large ring with fuchsia pink soil so that the visitor can climb and, giving him the lead, has seen the ensemble since then.
Death and resurrection of painting
For Nimfa Bisbe, the painting is in a very good state of health. This discipline “has expanded. In the exhibition catalog A permanent straight [organized at CaixaForum Barcelona in June 2019], David Barro said that the only thing that hasn't changed is the name but we would have to talk about the pictorial because we use a vocabulary that talks about color, figures, shapes and textures. When we see a video, for example, we say it is pictorial.” In this sense, he believes that painting is in our history and in our mind. “Even when we see a landscape, we see it with those eyes and that’s because the pictorial is part of our DNA”, he adds. Furthermore, more and more artists “return to the square canvas and continue to stain and get dirty with pigment, but painting – he concludes – is not just about what happens on a flat surface”.
