AXIS – PRAXIS by Judy Parkinson

NOTES ON THE EXHIBITION

Invited to curate the opening exhibition at Tracce di Vapore I wanted to show works by artists who are interlinked on several levels of cultural and formal reference. Each of the artists is a virtuoso practitioner of a personalized genre within contemporary painting and photography. This question of virtuoso technique, and its crucial role creating art with a deep and credible connection to the human condition, has been of great interest to me and illuminates my curatorial approach.

The exhibition evolves through two rooms starting with a painting by Matthew Radford of a rambling rose, which calls to mind Oriental paintings of cherry and plum blossom trees as metaphors for contemplation and a sense of alignment with the natural world.

An equally contemplative image by Walter & Zoniel, based on their seminal installation The Physical Possibility of Inspiring Imagination in the Mind of Someone Living, shows orb-like luminous jellyfish immersed in an otherwise unlit watery space. It both compels and confounds the viewer.

These photographs almost need associations evoked for them, yet even abstracted they convey a sense of optimism and reassurance, as though positive signals from another world.

A typically vibrant, exhilarating painting by Rebecca Youssefi, Meteor Shower above the Human Race continues a life affirming sense of awe at the scale of the cosmos and the innocent Garden of Earthly Delights experience of mankind in harmony with nature.

Two large format works, characteristic light drawings by Kirsten Reynolds, make a singularly elegiac gesture, hovering between earth and air – like traces of the beating wings of an otherwise invisible otherworldly presence.

The lucid, colour field paintings of Claudia De Grandi also contribute to a sense of receptive contemplative awareness of the natural world. A minimalist painter whose works reference the intense activity within the emptiness of space, De Grandi’s sometimes almost single colour paintings are related historically to the Black Paintings of Ad Reinhardt yet also to the flickering, constantly evolving LED numerals of Tatsuo Miyajima where the sheer energy and aliveness of the Void of the Buddhists is revealed figuratively as an infinite, infinitesimal, matrix.

I chose Untitled Painting XIII (Herne) as my own contribution to the exhibition. In what at first sight appears to be a straightforward painting of a wild northern landscape reveals on closer inspection an image of a startled stag, running scared from an unknown terror and floundering into a visibly polluted stream.

In Room 2 the lingering afterimage of vision and engagement evaporates sharply at the sight of Matthew Radford’s studies of city workers darting across the floors of a night time office building; like Edward Hopper characters whose ennui has transmuted to a hyperactive staging of gestures and panic.

Yet the sense of mild anxiety these paintings relay is nothing to the density of claustrophobia made visible in Stephen Newton’s Large Painting of a Bed and a Window. With its bleakness, implied loneliness and sorrow, it gives rise to the thought that all is not well in the Garden of Earthly Delights. Further paintings by Newton of challenged private lives continue the theme.

Across the hall the protagonists in a pair of highly energetic, collaged works by Oska Lappin shout out to the viewer to beware, perhaps as Stephen Stills put it, because ‘...there’s a man with a gun over there...’

Richard Hamilton, documenting, like a modern day Hogarth, the 1970 Kent State police massacre of demonstrating students, could not have better envisaged the random, elemental carnage that would become a regular part of suburban American life today.

Related to the lost rooms in Stephen Newton’s paintings and the shrieking Gangs of New York inhabitants of Lappin’s fevered nightmares, the drifting personae in Cat Roissetter’s delicately obscure drawings embody a strange middle ground in human fortune. Neither focused on politicized achievements or dismayed by their lack of worldly connection. They exist to drift and sometimes collide as figures in a world without meaning.

If these artists depict the existential crisis of modern times, Charlotte Snook conjures up the world at the beginning of modern times in Europe when the hierarchy of The Church and the power of the aristocracy was on the wane. In Snook’s 17th century artist’s studio, Picasso and Modigliani are hanging around, sharing a glass of absinthe and cracking a risqué joke with Tiepolo and his naked muse while waiting for Velasquez to drop by with the latest Django Reinhardt album.

They’re in a deceptively innocent staging of the lives of the artists, a perfect introduction to the engorged and engulfing world presented in Birth of Ideas by Jake and Dinos Chapman. Their work draws in and spits out the notion of the artist’s reflective commentary on society like a madcap Edward Lear rhyme delivered by Johnny Rotten.

Adjacent light drawings by Kirsten Reynolds, uncannily akin to the Chapman brothers etched lines and full of fury, burn bright, into the forest of the night.

After the visual hysteria of these pieces Medium Trees, a video by Overlap, shows another side of the post-industrial confrontation between Society and Nature, a lyrical, affirming reduction of landscape narrative which signals a way of redeeming attitudes to Nature in the electronic age.

Catherine Balet’s Strangers in the Light photographs, hybrid stylizations of Old Master painting subjects illuminated by electronic devices, create a disturbingly anxious portrait of a quietly dysfunctional society.

A coolly methodical painting of the countryside of an England about to be lost, by Tim Craven, signifies both epilogue and prologue.

Alan Rankle Milan

AXIS : LONDON MILANO – IL CONCEPT

La scelta di artisti da riunire per il lancio di un nuovo spazio espositivo a Milano ha dato origine a considerazioni importanti sulla scena dell’arte contemporanea in Europa e nel mondo. Gli artisti esistono e vivono spesso in ambiti precari che ospitano le avanguardie della società. Le loro opere quindi possono rappresentare il cambiamento ed idee che rimangono ancora invisibili ai radar della discussione tradizionale.

In questa Europa caotica e politicamente problematica l’arte preferisce essere più poetica che politica. La visione di questo progetto è quindi quella di creare uno spazio in cui le arti portino all’apertura verso un nuovo paradigma: uno spazio per le arti finalizzato a comunicare il nostro tempo e il nostro posto nel mondo.

Collaborare con Alan Rankle e l’imprenditore creativo Andrea Vento per mettere insieme Axis : London Milano, con l’unico punto in comune che era quello di essere artisti che lavorano a Londra, è stato emozionante e stimolante, anche per il fatto che Milano rimane una piazza culturale di primordine al mondo.

La posizione di Milano ha giocato un ruolo importante nei secoli per quanto riguarda la tradizione visiva così come la comunicazione artistica ed il linguaggio culturale. La città di Milano è un luogo importante per le arti e per il coraggio delle battaglie politiche fin dal Medioevo per giungere al presente. Basti pensare ad artisti come Leonardo Da Vinci che distillano visione e capacità creando stabilità e unità nel tumulto dell’Italia rinascimentale. Londra ha poi avuto intrinseche connessioni con la scena artistica italiana, testimoniate dall’entusiasmo della scoperta da parte degli artisti del Grand Tour come Turner e Bonnington. La combinazione di un’area urbana e borghese milanese con edifici storici come la Fabbrica del Vapore ed il vicino Cimitero Monumentale offrono uno speciale contesto culturale ed architettonico per la mostra Axis.

Dopo alcuni mesi di attento studio sui vari artisti, il concetto di Axis : London Milano è emerso come progetto estremamente raffinato. Andrea Vento ha dato ad Alan Rankle Studio ed a me la libertà di presentare le nostre idee a sostegno del lancio e dell’apertura di questo nuovo spazio: Tracce di Vapore.

La selezione di artisti per questa mostra comunica valore ed apprezzamento della tradizione pur mantenendo la consapevolezza della contemporaneità. Il tutto lanciando un messaggio positivo e cooperativo per Gran Bretagna, Italia ed Europa nel suo complesso.

Claudia De Grandi Milano

AXIS : LONDON MILANO – THE CONCEPT

Choosing artists to bring together for the launch of a new exhibition space in Milan gave rise to my considering important aspects of the contemporary art scene in Europe and world. Artists often exist in the precarious regions on the cutting edge of society and their works can signpost changes taking place as yet underneath the radar of mainstream discussion.

In this chaotic and politically problematic Europe and preferring to be poetical rather than political, the vision for this project was to create a space where the arts bring an opening towards a new paradigm. A space for the arts to communicate our time and our place in the world.

Collaborating with Alan Rankle and the creative entrepreneur Andrea Vento to put together Axis : London Milano, with a brief to show only artists working from London, was exciting and challenging, not least the idea of bringing artists to one of the all-time cultural centres of the world.

Location, in this case, plays a significant point of engagement with the visual tradition as well as the artistic communication and language. The city of Milan is an important place for the arts as well as for the bravery of political battles since medieval times to the present. As in the case of artists like Leonardo Da Vinci bringing his vision and skills to create stability and unity in the turmoil of medieval Italy. London has intrinsic connections with the Italian art scene, witnessing the excitement of discovery by artists on The Grand Tour like Turner and Bonnington. The combination of an urban and gentrified area with historical buildings such as Tracce di Vappore and the nearby Mausoleum brings a special cultural context for the current show.

Over many months of careful considerations of various artists works, the concept for Axis : London Milano emerged as a meaningfully curated project. It gave Alan Rankle Studio and myself the freedom to present our ideas to Andrea Vento and Associates for the launch and to celebrate the opening of this crucial new space – The Tracce di Vappore.

The selection of artists for this show communicates the value and appreciation of tradition while maintaining awareness of the contemporary world. Firming a positive and cooperative new paradigm for Britain, Italy and Europe as a whole.

Claudia De Grandi Milan