Luca Buvoli: Astrodoubt and the Quarantine Chronicles (An Introduction)

Luca Buvoli: Astrodoubt and the Quarantine Chronicles (An Introduction) Curated by John G. Hanhardt

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ISBN: 978-1-7355856-7-3

Luca Buvoli: Astrodoubt and the Quarantine Chronicles (An Introduction) Curated by John G. Hanhardt January 28 – March 5, 2021

CRISTIN TIERNEY GALLERY 219 BOWERY, FLOOR 2, NEW YORK, NY 10002

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Featuring new video and works on paper, Astrodoubt and the Quarantine Chronicles (An Introduction) is Luca Buvoli’s first solo show in New York in 13 years.

The exhibition is curated by John G. Hanhardt, who first became interested in the work when he saw it on Buvoli’s Instagram.

Astrodoubt and the Quarantine Chronicles (An Introduction) speaks directly to our times and the changing expectations, hopes, fears and vulnerability that fill our lives. Based on a conceptual and tragicomic graphic novel started by Buvoli in April 2020, the exhibition explores the challenges of navigating daily life in a pandemic-ridden world. Through the perspective of the spacesuit-wearing protagonist, Astrodoubt, the works excavate the impact of our collective divergence from and return to “normalcy.”

At the center of the exhibition is a large-scale wall sculpture Galaxy Wall that invites the viewer on an epic imaginary journey, turning a mundane episode of home vacuum cleaning into black holes merging in outer space. Also included is Buvoli’s latest video, A Brief History of Time (Under Covid). Through engaging hand-painted animated sequences, the work chronicles how time is understood in philosophy and science. Welcome to Covidville, a 5-channel video animation, uses DIY sets and low-tech claymation to narrate Astrodoubt’s drifting and wandering with drama, absurdity and humor. Related gouaches, watercolors, collages, sculptures, portfolios and artist’s books are also on view.

The series Astrodoubt and the Quarantine Chronicles is part of Space Doubt, a multimedia “science and art expedition” started in 2009 thanks to a collaboration with NASA scientists.

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A Brief History of Time (Under Covid) – in 7 Lessons, 2022. single-channel HD video. 13:34 minutes.

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Welcome to Covidville, 2022. five-channel HD video installation. 12:17 minutes.

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Luca Buvoli: Parallel Worlds “A Story with Interpolations and Bifurcations” — Jacques Roubaud When I opened my Instagram account last year, the world was being impacted by COVID. I found myself away from my home in New York City and living a calmly protected existence in what was becoming a second home. Still, there was a growing anxiety and anticipation of what the future might hold. I felt like I was drifting on a calm lake far from shore, trying to imagine where the shoreline was and what the future held. Instagram felt like sending messages in a bottle that was grabbed by hands emerging from under water, and then receiving bottles thrown back onto the deck of my boat. So many Instagram posts showing friends, celebrities, people’s lunches, nostalgic photographs, exhibitions visited, all coming across as self-congratulatory acknowledgments of what we thought we knew and where we thought we were in this vexing time of social isolation.

One of the posts in my feed stood out from all the rest: A clear and confident series of drawings that depicted a mysterious figure wearing a space suit, recalling Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, asking questions about the world COVID was making.

The space suit was worn by a character called Astrodoubt, a wonderful melding of confidence and self-doubt who embodied the discourse of Instagram in this period of questioning, instability, and confusion. Astrodoubt was a faceless figure whose presence shifted the ground over which he walked, a landscape filled with imaginary architecture drawn in such a way that gave hope.

The artist behind this drawn animation is Luca Buvoli, who I remembered from his earlier, evocative drawings of Not-a-Superhero, an ambiguous but compelling figure inspired by the superheroes of the comics but fitted out with all the vulnerability that the traditional superheroes lack. Not-a-Superhero flitted across the virtual screen of projected film as well as the surface of paper as a fragile yet resolute animated figure. While Not-A-Superhero was being challenged by his own demons, Astrodoubt was caught up in the threatening presence of the pandemic. Both of these sets of drawings and

animations are sustained works of art that express a profound sense of who we are as we imagine our futures.

Since Luca and I were last in contact, he was diagnosed with cancer, from which he is now recovering.

He also spent time in India, where the visual culture inspired the new narrative strategies articulated in his drawings, animations, artist books, flip books, and installation art. His profound experience of illness shaped his aesthetic, which became more searching in nature. Like his earlier animations, this new work reflected Luca’s fluid style of drawing, which fused the fragility of the drawn figure with the shifting sense of time through which Not-a-Superhero and Astrodoubt moved. These images combine his animated and morphing line with a conceptual narrative that references the hand of the artist with the tropes of traditional animation. Luca is a master draftsman and an expressive graphic artist who brings his figurative drawing into a virtual present-day sciencefiction landscape.

As I unpacked the multiple meanings and implications of Luca’s art, I began to see references to art history as well as to our various social and cultural worlds. There is a restless quality to Luca’s art, a desire to bring to life parallel worlds we might inhabit and imagine through science and art. Animation, the transformation of drawing into movement, became the means for his imagination to ground itself in multiple worlds of moving images. This all became clear to me through our conversations, in which we discovered that we both had a profound interest in the historical avant-gardes. As I thought about Luca’s project, I was drawn to a text (which I used as an epigram for this essay), “a story with interpolations and bifurcations.” It is the subtitle of the French artist Jacques Roubaud’s novel Le Grand Incendie de Londres (The Great Fire of London). Roubaud is part of the loosely affiliated OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a group founded in the 1960s that takes as its creative process the idea of composing texts within specific constraints. It’s a group that shares with 17

“Good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction (sens); but paradox is the affirmation of both senses or directions at the same time.”

— Gilles Deleuze

other avant-garde ensembles, such as Fluxus, the fact that it’s less a movement than an idea. The idea behind OULIPO was not to overturn the art world, which was Fluxus’s banner call, but to work within structures that acknowledged that writing is a textual process that operates within specific systems and limitations—in other words, writing that expresses thoughts or states of mind through stories and observations struggles to exist within the frame of the written text and page. Roubaud’s magnum opus, The Great Fire of London, is about the challenges and frustrations he experiences in the act of writing.

I began to see the framework, or the screen, of Instagram as a structure in which Luca’s imagination could spin out a quest across time through his epic new work A Brief History of Time (Under Covid)—in 7 Lessons and the planetary experience of Welcome to Covidville. A sense of failure lurks at the edges of both of these artworks, caused by the experience and impact of COVID on our daily lives. In its embracive ambition to knit together the philosophies and experiences of time with our current crisis of knowledge and science, the project creates an epic OULIPO-inspired text. Luca’s artworks speak to the open-ended sense of where we are now, in a world that is continuing to suffer a cascading and endless sense of failure.

Another key to appreciating Luca’s art is to recognize the fragility and playfulness that exist alongside its seriousness. Luca’s artworks engage in an interplay between past and present along the nexus of the artist’s life and his interests in science and art history. All of his work is marked by narratives filled with recognizable figures and actions that take an uncanny and unexpected turn, causing one to look back at the past or imagine the future. A Brief History of Time (Under Covid), premiering in this exhibition, is a case in point. Signposted by the names of philosophers and ideas from science, it unfolds in a projection that evokes a cinematic space. It also picks up on themes explored in Astrodoubt and the Quarantine Chronicles— including what Luca refers to as the tragicomic undertow that seems to envelop Astrodoubt.

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Luca’s drawings are static and yet propel themselves through the sequencing of his animations. His work reminds me of a long line of great animators, including Jules Engel, Harry Smith, Suzan Pitt, Larry Jordan, and Robert Breer, in its metamorphosing line and ability to acknowledge that the meaning attached to certain places or images is fragile and mutable. Landscapes, periods from our past, or moments in history are often remembered as images, but those images have lost their original meanings. These artists explore those original meanings through drawings that come alive as projected moving images. Focusing on staying healthy and remembering the past, Luca’s self-referencing drawings tell a new story in a new way. I turn here to another OULIPO author, Georges Perec, who, in his masterpiece Life: A User’s Manual, writes, “The (jigsaw puzzle) pieces are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing—just an impossible question, an opaque challenge.…

The two pieces so miraculously conjoined are henceforth one, which in turn will be a source of error, hesitation, dismay, and expectation.”

I was reminded of Perec’s rooms of the imagination in Life: A User’s Manual when I visited Luca’s studio on the Lower East Side. It was like entering a private space that extended beyond its walls in its embrace of the imagination. This studio is the site of many stories told through a variety of artforms and art practices seized upon by Luca. It recalls one of the rooms in Life: A User’s Manual, a space with suspended sculptures that evokes the artworks Luca created for his Space Doubt project (2009- ) at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and NASA, where he pursued his research into space travel.

(When I first visited, Luca offered me a glass of Tang, the beverage of astronauts.) The studio is a space of multiple activities, an archive of experiments, past projects, plans, and public sculptures. Artist studios offer a path to understanding an artist’s way of working. Preparing the exhibition of Luca’s drawings, sculptures, installations, and videos on view in the Cristin Tierney Gallery was like putting together

a jigsaw puzzle of pieces that revealed the artist’s understanding of the traditions of drawing, the graphic languages within scientific and popular culture, the narrative forms of comics and the graphic novel, and the movement of graphic animation.

Galaxy Wall—Episode 10: IN THE UNIVERrrssseeeee (from Astrodoubt and the Quarantine Chronicles) is the centerpiece of the exhibition, a wall sculpture with 33 panels spiraling out over a single gallery wall leading us through a cosmic sense of the infinite.

The movement implied across the panels is picked up in the five channels of Welcome to Covidville, juxtaposing drawing to the videos on flat screens.

Here the articulation of two-dimensional drawing on paper and three-dimensional movements on the video screens becomes a compelling dialogue between the virtual and hand drawn. These issues are picked up in the spectacularly ambitious single-screen video A Brief History of Time (Under Covid), which leads us through a philosophical exploration of time that places Astrodoubt in a virtual universe of speculative thought. Luca’s drawings convey a quality of immediacy, the quick response of a narrative that unfolds at its own speed and urgency. Astrodoubt moves through a universe of shifting expectations, hopes, and fears, and he speaks directly to our times.

John G. Hanhardt

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Astrodoubt Arriving by Bike – Animation Drawing for Lesson 5 of “A Brief History of Time (Under Covid)” on Cosmic Panel, 2022. gouache, acrylic, and pencil on black acid-free paper on cosmic panel (velvet, foamcore, pushpins, thumb tacks, wood, metal).

Drawing: 12 1/2 x 9 inches (31.8 x 22.9 cm).

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Cityscape – Animation Drawing for Lesson 5 of “A Brief History of Time (Under Covid)” on Cosmic Panel, 2022. gouache, acrylic, pencil, and collage on black acid-free paper on cosmic panel (velvet, foamcore, pushpins, thumb tacks, wood, metal).

Drawing: 12 1/2 x 9 inches (31.8 x 22.9 cm).

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Astrodoubt Biking – Animation Drawing for Lesson 5 of “A Brief History of Time (Under Covid)” on Cosmic Panel, 2022. gouache, watercolor, acrylic, pencil, and collage on black acid-free paper, on cosmic panel (velvet, foamcore, pushpins, thumb tacks, wood, metal). Drawing: 12 1/2 x 9 inches (31.8 x 22.9 cm).

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Astrodoubt (Vitamin Sculpture from “Space Doubt”), 2016.

UV-resistant polyurethane resin, pigment, epoxy clay, enamel paint, wire, vitamins, stepper motor, and microprocessor.

Variable height: 9 x 6 inches (22.9 x 15.2 cm).

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PREVIOUS SPREAD:

Galaxy Wall (Episode 10: IN THE UNIVERrrssseeeee from “Astrodoubt and the Quarantine Chronicles”), 2022.

33 drawings (acrylic, gouache, ink, pencil, and collage on black acid-free paper), MDF panels, polymer clay frames reinforced with wire mesh, wood, primer, spray paint, and curtain rods.

105 x 192 x 21 inches (266.7 x 487.7 x 53.3 cm).

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Astrodoubt and the Quarantine Chronicles: Eggxit, 2021. woodcut with handmade paper chine-collé. 20 x 20 inches (50.8 x 50.8 cm).

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Luca Buvoli (b. 1963, Italy) is a multimedia artist who has exhibited internationally for over 30 years. His sculptures are included in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Guggenheim Museum; his animated films and videos have been shown individually or as part of his expanded multimedia projects at the 2007 Venice Biennale, the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, and at many international museums, biennials, and institutions.

Museum solo shows include the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Video Gallery), M.I.T. List Center, ICA in Philadelphia, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Glassell School of Art of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Austin Museum of Art, Queens Museum of Art, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. In 2020, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., commissioned Buvoli an episode of Astrodoubt for the inaugural online solo exhibition of the museum’s Digital Intersections series. Buvoli is the Director of the Mount Royal School of Art Multidisciplinary Master of Fine Arts Program at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, MD. His studio is based in New York.

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Photography credits:

Elisabeth Bernstein: 4-5, 7, 9, 11, 22-23, 27, 30-31, 35-37, 41-43, 59

Cristin Tierney Gallery 219 Bowery, Floor 2 New York, NY 10002 212.594.0550 www.cristintierney.com