Alessandro Casciaro

With the mass of their bodies and their intensive physical presence they take over the surrounding space and invite you to interact with them: take for instance those human figures enclosed in a construction of scaffolding poles, hunched up in themselves, or with outstretched limbs, appearing to be wedged in or trapped, but also protected and sheltered, as if in a cocoon. Anvidalfarei speaks of a veritable compulsion which forces him to create these bodies in heavy bronze. His inspiration and perception are shaped by his previous experiences fuelled, amongst other influences, by his mundane existence as a farmer. The artist looks with sober eyes, but at the same time with much love and empathy, at human beings and human existence. With titles such as “Becoming”, “The Prodigal Son”, or “Reconciliation Group”, his sculptures are an experience which has become material, but endowed with an emotional-existential, even religious quality. The artist makes the bronze come to life; the seemingly misshapen forms do not obey classical theories of proportion, but are modelled on a real body, often the artist’s own body. In his work the artist is inevitably confronting himself with his various moods, his state of mind, his emotions. They are mostly portly figures, male as well as female, who do not appear to reflect current ideals of beauty and representations of the Zeitgeist, and yet which are so much closer to reality than the models or society stars which constantly entice us with their smiles from the covers of glossy magazines, from internet forums or films. The bronze sculptures are not abstract, not conceptual, not even properly innovative, as far as the medium and its implementation, its themes, are concerned, and yet these works, in their authentic genuineness and their intensive liveliness, are topical and current. Anvidalfarei’s people live in our world whilst simultaneously remaining in their own peculiar world, they are not interested in us, the spectators, and yet we cannot stop ourselves from looking at them, from engaging with them.

For years now this German artist has been continuing his quest to combine complex digital manipulations of photography with architectural elements or virtual spaces. He does not seek to reproduce reality, as is the case with photography, but rather to create a new reality, an individual place or a landscape, with the aid of an obvious technique distinctly reminiscent of painting. If his previous works were characterised by strong objective and narrative elements, his new cycle is almost introspective. The references he makes to other artistic movements (the way he draws on the iconography and the colouring of American abstract expressionism is undeniable) highlight the close relationship which the artist perceives between the product of his own imagination and reality as he experiences it, and the heritage left to us by the masters of classical painting. It represents a form of veneration, whilst simultaneously regenerating and reactivating his work. Castell draws inspiration and creative impulses from moments of peace and contemplation. According to the artist, this is rather like dreaming. Much is stored in our subconscious mind and can be conjured up in moments of peace and quiet. The pictures created in this way refer less to actual events or definite stories, but rather portray an underlying mood, the inner feelings and sentiments of the artist, although they are also to do with allegorical symbols and collective thoughts. Motifs and images from different worlds and times, fragmentary traces from the past, the present and a projected future, are grouped together and give rise to a plethora of interpretations and associations.

Dall'O shows how art receives the witness from philosophy in this 21st century, realizing a real strategy that combines theory and practice. His painting escapes disciplinary categories to access the level of discourse and, above all, transforms it into an instrument of conceptual elaboration. He removes it from the predominance of the diffused image to make it inseparable from the conceptual intention, he renounces a precise center in favor of a sinuous course full of syntactic and mnemonic diversions, always placing language at the top of the creative process. In the pictorial process structured by the artist is inherent and inseparable a metalinguistic reflection, which unfolds in the creative process, questioning itself in its making, the meaning of painting and the role of the artist in today's society. An operation carried out by the artist that transforms a solid ethical principle - existential and expressive work - into a well-organized aesthetic paradigm. In line with the theoretical and aesthetic research of those who defend memory as a structuring element of the identity of the individual (including the historian Hobsbawn with his cry "protest against forgetting") Dall'O carries out an ethical work that aims to defend the memory and especially the significant significance of each image against the pervasive invasion of media icons destitute of meaning, which daily fall under our senses. By taking "pure" images from the media flow, destined to be forgotten by perceptive saturation, he makes the objectivity of photography dialogue with the subjectivity of painting, the recognizability of visual codes and identities, historical and chronicle (clothes ... posture, physiognomy) with the depth of time mise en abyme. The photograph "false at the level of perception, true at the level of time" as Barthes said, is used as a catalyst and palimpsest for its Proustian dimension of feeling for affections and feelings. It is the only instrument capable of "objectively" crystallizing time and delivering it to usable memory, subtracting "moments" from the flow that dissolves everything.

Jürgen Klauke (Kliding, 1943) is a unique figure in contemporary art. Above all, he paved the way for staged photography by conceptualising the photographic medium and elevating it to the immanent theme of his art. He has raised the question of gender differentiation more emphatically and radically than others, and so in doing has exacerbated to the point of excess the problem of identity with his sometimes provocative images. He himself speaks of the "aestheticisation of the existential". He participated at Documenta 6 & 8 and at the Biennale di Venezia. Jürgen Klauke lives and works in Cologne.

Salvatore Mammoliti's representations of ripe fruits and insects are part of a tradition of hyper-realistic still life painting, technically refined, even masterful, which in Italy dates back to the fifteenth century. This painting of the natural reality, in the arrangements of fruits, in the manifestations, symbolically elevated, of the transience and of the sensual pleasure, has brought in astonishing way to the reflections of the contemporaries of today, where the natural has degenerated in an object of consumption always and everywhere found, the rare and exotic has become something of daily available, assuming in the art a new meaning. I am thinking, for example, of the ironic iconography of pop-art artists from Oldenburg to Warhol, but also of French and American hyperrealists. Mammoliti's still lifes, also through the isolation of objects in the white pictorial spaces, illustrate the multiple relationships between nature and culture. His fruits, grouped, divided and open by him, are defined not only in a material way, but also in a symbolic one. As a skilful representation of cultivated nature, these still lifes offer a metal level of nature that is culturally deformed and interpreted. They express the relationship between art and life, between aesthetic appearance and intrinsic value, between fiction and reality, between sense and sensuality. If at first glance we think that here we are dealing with simple representations of fruit, so beloved and widespread in Italy, later we discover that Mammoliti is a very special circus director who presents a sort of circus show not with ferocious beasts, but with fruits and butterflies. In the empty space of the painting he arranges the fruits in balance exercises that seem to be stunts, plays with butterflies and caterpillars, combines a radicchio head with a strawberry inside to form a sort of monstrance, or stretches a pear divided in two so as to look like a naked woman lying down. Before him many painters have already discovered the sensual character of fruits, finding metaphors of body parts with sexual connotations. We know the analogy between banana and phallus, but also the games of meaning with open fruits and female sexual organs. In this sense, Mammoliti is a surrealist who, as a master of hyperrealist painting, with his inventory, the world of fruits, presents us with amazing games of meaning.

"I am interested in the brief moment that is not perceptible to the naked eye. I arrest it, take it out of its movement and thus create sculptures of the moment. The focus is on the ephemeral, the uniqueness and the finiteness."
Sissa Micheli

Sissa Micheli questions the everyday and the familiar in a variety of photographs, video works and objects and opens up new perspectives. What can be perceived on the surface frequently refers to something else, something behind it, to a hidden story that can only be guessed at, to a riddle that can only be solved to a limited extent. Curious and inquiring, she approaches her fields of investigation and creates a sensual and enigmatic microcosm that moves between reality and fiction, past, present and future. Beyond their functional attribution, Micheli lends objects highly charged levels of meaning with surreal radiant power. For example, the artist is exhibiting two new photographic works from the series Museum’s Rhapsody - Objective Correlatives, in which she combines objects from the Palais Mamming Museum in Merano with each other without there being any compelling relationship between them. Through a sensitive, poetic as well as humorous arrangement, however, they are endowed with new meaning. This results in unusual as well as bizarre objects: in King of Pins an old decorated hair clip serves as a hair accessory for a skull, in Tears of the Past petrified tears of milky quartz protrude from a chipped marble head of the Empress Elisabeth associations with the Dolomites come to mind. Set against a black background in a highly dramatic manner, the photographs invite the viewers to continue the stories themselves, to find new meanings and interpretations. Staging the mise-en-scène is an essential part of Micheli’s work in general, the moving, dynamic image is a constant companion. Time and again, the artist blurs the boundaries between film, photography, and sculpture: she captures the smoke of a pipe photographically and transfers it to the floor as a large-scale carpet or transforms it as a lava-like mass into a surreal three-dimensional object. Using flying garments, she stages fascinating temporary sculptures that celebrate the ephemeral and transitory in a sensual and musical game. At the same time, the works also epitomise the basic characteristic of photography, to capture a moment and to freeze it visually in order to give it meaning. In the new triptych Scenarios of Existence created especially for this exhibition, mighty textiles reminiscent of animal heads or skulls hover in front of the face of a female figure. The human being, thrown into the world, is vulnerable, at the mercy of finite nature and of death.

The impact of the works of Robert Pan derives from their beauty of concept and construction, from the intensity and splendor of their colors, from the exactitude and sure effect of the way those colors are nuanced. The pigments are applied in numerous successive layers, sealed in resin, and filed and polished, all in the light of carefully construed relationships between areas of opacity and transparence. Pan’s craftsmanship is the vehicle for the achievement of a multidimensional experience of color in which larger and more complex tones result from the varying articulation of the hues that resonate beneath them. Robert Pan has always looked askance at the obvious, and has once again decided to voyage into places outside the realms of reason. He complicates our vision of daily experience, leading us beyond the extant and into the Eden of imagination, at the antipodes of objective observation. He allows us to grasp both the visible and invisible, material physicality and immaterial idea, the indeterminate point of view no less than the world of imperceptible detail, the metaphoric flowing of color and the immutable solidification of resins.

ARTARCTIC is an artistic-scientific project first conceived in 2021 and based on collaboration between terraXcube, Festival Transart and Peter Senoner. In this project, the terraXcube extreme climate simulation centre has been transformed into a temporary artist’s studio and has become an artistic-scientific experimental set-up. This project is now being continued. Since his artistic beginnings in New York at the turn of the millennium, Peter Senoner’s artistic practice has been situated in the field of tension between human existence, ultra-technology and habitat. In the terraXcube, all these factors are now combined: at a simulated height above sea level of 5,000m, in the midst of an artificially generated snowstorm, the artist is working on an extraordinary series of works. Larger-than-life picture tableaux are being created and worked on as a performative painterly/sculptural series of works. Is artistic work and the generation of ideas possible in this extreme environment, or indeed, will the creative processes even be intensified by it? Does the work on the larger-than-life picture tableaux become an existential feat of strength or does the narrative flow easily? Are the subjective feelings and the objective comprehensibility of the creative decisions congruent?
The combination of high altitude, cold and snow has already been tested in medical studies in the terraXcube. The aim was to understand how the human body reacts to such extreme environmental conditions.
With ARTARCTIC, the extreme climate simulator terraXcube becomes the setting for an artistic-performative event as a planned continuation and further evolution of the original project initiated within the framework of Transart 2021. With this collaboration, the terraXcube is addressing a different audience than the scientific one with which it normally enters into dialogue. The artist is medically monitored during his work by means of a chest strap for real-time sensor technology. ECG, heart rate, breathing rate and oxygen saturation are continuously recorded. These parameters flow into the artistic work in real time. Scientific data generation and creative idea processes form an exciting dialogue. The artist’s physiological data are collected and recorded by the terraXcube research team. Along with data from medical studies, they will provide new insights into the effects of extreme climate conditions on humans. The whole scenario can be followed online via livestream, as well as directly on site by the audience on the monitors in the entrance area and through the control windows of the setup room. The central work ARTARCTIC_tableaux will remain permanently in the terraXcube as a “trace element” of the performance. The other works are exhibited at the Alessandro Casciaro Gallery in Bolzano until 14 January 2023, together with other previously unpublished works by the artist.

Presented on large-scale canvases and depicted in vibrant, almost lurid colours, Kinki Texas’s subjects may appear to have been quickly dashed off but have in fact been developed over a period of months. Their lengthy process of creation is only revealed on closer inspection, when the different stages of the picture’s evolution can gradually be traced. While Kinki Texas has a particular theme and subject matter in mind when he begins working on his pictures, he also reacts to what happens during the painting process, with the result that the development of the images can take unexpected turns. He paints, sprays, writes, wipes and scrapes away until he reaches a state where any additional painterly touch would overload the image, but any missing one would make it seem unfinished. The heroic figures in “Kinki Texas Space”, this is what the artist calls his creative universe, which draws as much inspiration from the comic genre as it does from television’s History Channel, employing means of depiction borrowed from graffiti and trash culture as well as from centuries of history painting, their appearance ranges from slightly strange to truly bizarre; some of them have a warlike and at times rather frightening demeanour; they confront the viewer with loaded guns, pose in suits of armour with swords drawn or like Native Americans with headdresses, bows and arrows.

In his works on canvas, paper or glass, Antonello Viola traces a chromatic perimeter where, through a process of accumulation, stratification and sedimentation, the canvas becomes a place devoted to meditation and the research of the absolute. The artist converts invisible into visible with thin layers of paint that are then scraped, removed and deleted. The painting's quiet surface is animated by signs that reveal what lies underneath, the deep, pulsating matter that ultimately gives shape to the work. The artist's visual experiences and the memory of them are absorbed by this process of stratification and sublimated in the colour layers. Through the material density of his work, Viola establishes a new relationship with space, a renewed dialogue between the inner dimension of the work and the environment that surrounds it, in which the artist does not act instinctively or empirically, but moves from a specific project. This simple shape is intended to hold the colour in its perimeter, a fence whose boundaries are instead constantly exceeded by the vibrating energy of the act of painting. Viola establishes a new relationship with the modern tradition of monochrome painting, where the reduction of the pictorial vocabulary corresponds to a positive and constructive understanding of the world, which perception is renewed through the energy of colour. His most recent works have been characterised by the use of quite varied materials: Japanese paper, glass, gold leaf and oil pigments; single and multiple formats which are presented in careful compositions.