Our weekly focus is on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Edoardo Tresoldi Studio Visit
2. Homemade Security Patrol Robot by Handy Geng.First-Century. Via Art21
3. Sun Setting Recreated in The Netherlands 3 A: “The sun’s going down like a big bald head.” Courtesy William S. Burroughs
BSA Special Feature: Edoardo Tresoldi Studio Visit
You may have wondered about the mind of the sculptor Edoardo Tresoldi, whose public works have drawn thousands to inspect the wireframe echoes of grand architectural wonders, illuminated to show only their transparent skins. We certainly have.
Homemade Security Patrol Robot by Handy Geng.
Inventors are visionaries; we’ll all agree. They also must be persistent. We admire individuals who can anticipate future needs and create inventions that shape the world, but we adore the ones who face numerous obstacles and setbacks but persevere in their pursuit of their ideas, exhibiting determination, resilience, and a refusal to give up on their inventions. A sense of humor helps.
Sun Setting Recreated in The Netherlands
Ludmila Rodrigues in collaboration with Mike Rijnierse re-create the everyday phenomenon of the sun setting inside the city of Delft in The Netherlands.
“The sun’s going down like a big bald head.” Courtesy William S. Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, and Sharkey’s Night.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. “Gilded Darkness” Fondazione Nicola Trussardi 2. Edoardo Tresoldi. Monumento. Procuratie Vecchie. Venice, Italy. 3. How To Make A Concrete Bike. Via DIY 4. Britain’s Long Goodbye to Queen Elizabeth II. via The New Yorker
BSA Special Feature: “Gilded Darkness” Fondazione Nicola Trussardi
“An Omni-comprehensive, multimedia spectacle,” says Massimiliano Gioni of Nari Ward’s ‘Gilded Darkness’ now on display at Centro Balneare Romano in Milan. The artistic director and the artist speak about the new exhibition that is on view until October 17th.
It’s part of an ongoing opportunity for artists to conceive of and build their sculptures and other installations in an environment that blends seamlessly into street culture, says Gioni.
“We rediscover forgotten or hidden places in the neighborhoods of Milan and invite artists to intervene in these very charged and unusual spaces. The center is a complex of buildings dating back to the 1920s; a very beautiful mixture of metaphysical architecture and rationalist and modernist architecture,” he says.
“Monumental architecture is a composition that neglects function in order to ritualize a thought by means of a three-dimensional work. The history of peoples is that of a hereditary flow of rhetorical figures which continuously recur in cycles; they redefine their own meanings and establish symbolisms that we have not only learned to read but which, generation after generation, we have absorbed as a sort of latent language of the collective unconscious.”
How To Make A Concrete Bike. Via DIY
Questions answered. That’s our job here. You were dying to learn how to make a concrete bike. You’re welcome.
Britain’s Long Goodbye to Queen Elizabeth II. Via The New Yorker
The largest funeral in modern memory, this week people said goodbye to the Queen
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Dyva & Haeck painting on the Molotow train. 2. THIS IS INDECLINE: A Showreel 3. Edoardo Tresoldi: Opera
BSA Special Feature: Dyva & Haeck painting on the Molotow train.
On this episode of Graff TV the featured graffiti writers are Dyva and Haeck who paint the Molotow train.
Graffiti TV 100: Dyva & Haeck painting on the Molotow train.
THIS IS INDECLINE: A Showreel
Now see kids, this is what they call a showreel. That’s when they put together their greatest hits and play a screaming apocalyptic metal soundtrack over top of it all.
“An archetypal image”, Edoardo Tresoldi says, “is capable of creating a dialogue between past and present, using a language comprised of meanings that recur over time.”
Again he tarries in this trade: the recurrent symbol or motif in architecture lifted from its source and presented in wire and light to evoke hallowed, revered spaces elsewhere. It’s a stunning realization that your emotional rapture is triggered in some way, insignificant or profound, by this relatively simple recreative act.
Opening this week at the Art Museum of the City of Ravenna, Tresoldi re-calls his piece called Sacral for an exhibition called “Dante. The Eyes and the Mind”. Viewable until January 9 the installation occupies the eye of your mind, the central tenant of this Castle of the Great Souls. According to Dante, this central location – pivotal, buoyant, luminous – “is a symbolic place inhabited by the souls of those who left honor and fame behind them on earth. They are the great souls of antiquity – philosophers, poets, scientists, and writers – with grave and slow-moving eyes.”
We’re pleased to help readers gaze upon it and see what essence has been captured from the 16th-century cloister that is relevant to our present – or at the very least, inspirational to it.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “Strength” from Pejac 2. Chant – Faith XVII 3. Spells, The Salton Sea – Faith XLVII 4. EDOARDO TRESOLDI, An Interview
BSA Special Feature: “Strength” from Pejac
Santander, Spain has suffered from COVID, of course, as has most of the country. Local street artist PEJAC says he wanted to contribute to his local hospital, the University Hospital Marqués de Valdecilla, by painting in public areas for people to enjoy. He says the common theme that unites the three distinctly different styles he used, is Strength.
“It’s a gesture of gratitude to the heath workers of Valdecilla, for their work in general and during this Covid crisis in particular,” says PEJAC
PEJAC / STRENGTH
FAITH XLVII / CHANT
Reliably enigmatic, street artist Faith XVII is using the medium of video to add impressions and associations to her works here on a text series called “Chant”. The irony of using the letter C that may call to mind Chase bank is drawn tighter as you see neighborhoods and walls probably redlined by corporate banks, or targeted for annihilation through neglect. In the context of our older societies, one may see in her work the power of chanting to focus a larger group to act in union with purpose, and power.
SPELLS / SALTON SEA / FAITH XLVII
60 miles south of Palm Springs, California, the Saltan Sea is disappearing, it’s shore moving miles in only a couple of decades, along with its population. Faith XVII is a Californian these days and she is here pondering the “beach” that remains, full of mercury, arsenic, selenium. California’s largest inland body of water now turns into dust, and Faith pours herself into the soil and the air that carries it; and the drought, well… How this translates to her art on the street or in the studio, it is in alignment with her ongoing concerns about climate change – and you can be sure this project will appear again in her work.
That is especially true when the work is at the typical scale of Italian artist Edoardo Tresoldi, whose massive mesh sculptures wowed the privileged guests at Coachella a couple of years ago in Indio, California. Those Neoclassical and Baroque architectural ghosts transported the imaginations of attendees there, but now they physically have been transported to Rome. Given a second life in Parco dei Daini, Villa Borghese, the show will run this autumn until mid-December.
Calling the installation Etherea, Tresoldi has entered it
into participation for “Back to Nature”, a new exhibition project curated by
Costantino d’Orazio. The artist says the works have been redesigned and
rearranged for the occasion and are meant to be part of a dialogue with the
trees of Villa Borghese. It’s good to see these works in a new context and
finding they have a similar character, still triumphant but more subdued
perhaps.
BACK TO NATURE Parco dei Daini, Villa Borghese, Rome Promoted by Roma Capitale, Assessorato alla Crescita culturale – Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali Until December 13, 2020 Free entry
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Gonzalo Borondo Matiére Noire 2. r1. on the corner of August House in Johannesburg
3. Banksy in Paris on FWTV
4. Joan Cabrer “Hot Pixel”
BSA Special Feature: Gonzalo Borondo Matiére Noire
A short documentary today taking us through last autumns On October 7th in Marseille, France in collaboration with Galerie Saint Laurent and Spanish artist Gonzalo Borondo as they presented Matière Noire. A massive collection of individual installations that took over the top floor of an exhibition space normally used for shops, Borondo’s influence in the selections is throughout, a story told in three acts on Projection, Perception and Interpretation.
Artists include BRBR FILMS, Carmen Main, Diego López Bueno, Edoardo Tresoldi, Isaac Cordal, Robberto Atzori, Sbagliato and A.L. Crego, with curatorial guidance from Carmen Main.
Borondo has thrown open the doors to this cavernous space for a vitrine displaying our strong attachments to the fragile, ethereal objects and impressions. Their original meanings mixing with your own, projecting yourself as you do upon them. This is a chance for the artist to experiment and explore – perhaps to pursue something they have not been able to previously. Here is the laboratory, here in the interstitial. Yours is the gift of perception.
Directed by Matteo Dellangelo, reflections blur into paintings and tapestries, shadows morph into cats sleeking moving just beyond your periphery. An army of executives kneel, their faces distraught and mournful as they ask forgiveness for ushering in the fascist age their now caught in; Revolutions of video, scraps of family warmth and other things that aren’t there; benchmarks in social ritual, humble sets for theaters of manners, possibe deceptions, probable blurry sherries, fizzy Tom Collins, tortoise shell horn rims, cracked crystal, hair cream, horny men and haberdashers snapping apart girdles and garters, knocking over the slide tray and projector.
There are dark natural wonders and new highways in this Internet of things; prize winning cakes and first communions and turtles and turtlenecks; crying babies, bonbons, blond wood, great escapes and many lost opportunities mixed among the found ones.
But we wander….The project is to successfully outline an object onto another surface, and each artist in this curiously lit labyrinth of myth, memory and phantasma plays with these objects to bend perception. Carmen Main helps you find the way.
r1. on the corner of August House in Johannesburg
The thrilling drilling of geometic chromadek adornment of the corner installation by artist r1 in South Africa. “It took me 4 days to install and I drilled 688 holes,” he says. “One of the key aspects I love about the work is its placement on the corner wall, creating a 3D like effect. It makes the artwork seem to pop out of the building, creating a sculptural-like mural.”
Banksy in Paris on FWTV
Join Doug Gillen as he assembles and analyzes the recent Banksy installations in Paris.
Joan Cabrer “Hot Pixel”
Dig this dark funky groove that accompanies the sweep of the spray as Joan Cabrer paints a recent wall in Barcelona. For more on the story check out
Soaring Architectural Sculpture Recalls a Long Lost Holy Place
An astounding display of the volume and spatial relations defined by the built environment is now rising in Siponto, Italy thanks to the imagination of street artist/public artist Edoardo Tesoldi, and thousands of cubic feet of wire.
“I imagined being able to draw in the air, while keeping a direct relationships with the context,” says Edoardo Tresoldi, the artist of this ethereal holy host. On this soil and in this context the sculpture is an epic interpretation of an early Christian church that at one time rose from this site not far from the ocean in Southern Italy.
Like an anthropod that has left its skin, the church is no longer here, but the exact replica, an exoskeleton that commands space stands hollow. The scale reminds you of the power the building and the institution had, the wind reminds you of its lack of staying power. The overall effect is as classical in its detail as it is post-modern in its digital-blur ephemerality.
Working in concert with the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and the Archaeology Superintendence of Puglia, ancient meets contemporary here and actually gives us pause to think of the relative meaning historically assigned to massively impressive architecture that one day soon may be recreated by pressing “print” on your enormous 3-D printer.
Curator Simone Pallotta speaks of this work by Tresoldi as “majestic”. He says that the axiometric installation, which continously changes as you walk around and through it, is “able to tell the volumes of existing early Christian Church and at the same time is able to vivify, updating it, the relationship between the ancient and the contemporary.” This is “a work that, breaking up the secular controversy of the arts primacy, summarizes two complementary languages into a single, breathtaking scenery,” and you will agree with his observations.
Departing from the pure aesthetics here, one wonders if this translucent work doesn’t also vilify the institutional Church for its daunting network of massive edifices that rise to the skies but do not rise to the occasion of serving the needs of the increasing number of poor who are desperate to be housed, clothed, fed. Interestingly, a couple of wire human forms are included in this installation, presumably to show scale, and they are ghost-like, unmoving.
A mirage of architecture and architectural history, the computer-modeling aspect of the experience makes it seem like the viewer is interacting with a hologram. Reduced to its elemental geometry the new sculpture could be interpreted as a fitting critique of the hollow institutions that set themselves quite apart from the people, behind majestic walls.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
