April 17 – May 20, 2021
Abed Al Kadiri | Eelco Brand | Jacob Hashimoto | Izima Kaoru
Franco Passalacqua | Roberto Pugliese | Lucas Reiner
Mario Schifano | Giorgia Severi | Andre Woodward
On 17 April 2021 Studio la Città will be opening a group show titled Today I would like to be a Tree, devoted to trees as a subject of the work of a selection of 10 artists from different cultures and backgrounds.
In August 2020 a violent cloudburst struck the territory of Verona, uprooting more than 500 large trees and damaging many others. Probably among the others were the two large Cedars of Lebanon that stood for decades by the Galtarossa firm next door to the gallery, and that in the past few weeks have been radically removed.
In the days before the cloudburst we had heard news of the terrible explosion on 4 August 2020 in the port of Beirut, that devastated the city and destroyed many buildings including the Tanit gallery, to which we are united by a long friendship. The Tanit gallery had only just opened the show, on 27 June, Remains of the Last Red Rose by Abed Al Kadiri: after not even ten days everything was lost. In the face of this loss Abed decided to work on a new project Today I would like to be a Tree, as an answer to this suffocation, in the widest sense, by choosing trees as a symbol of life and resistance.
All this has led us to reflect once more on the mankind-nature relationship. We have pinpointed trees as the perspectival and focal thematic centre and has given to the show the same title as the project by Al Kadiri, of whom there are exhibited some works on paper and the original canvas.
The ten artists who make up the show have chosen the tree as an object, each of them with their own voice and language, and each has delineated a personal tale that speaks of nature, mankind, the force of action and rebirth, of the ability to find a balance, and of life in all its extraordinary complexity.
The show begins with the historical work by Roberto Pugliese Critici ostinati ritmici (2010), a tree trunk massacred by hammer blows linked to a software that, receiving through internet data from the different sites to which it is linked and which in real time map global deforestation, activates the hammer blows that produce a sound similar to tens of crazed metronomes. Each of these clicks comes about symbolically when the world is beaten by a tree. A kind of memento mori of nature.
Abed Al Kadiri exhibits Today I would like to be a Tree, the large canvas from which the project started, and three pieces of two paper murals consisting of 80 sheets, each of which has been sold online and the profits of which will be used for the reconstruction of buildings destroyed on 4 August 2020. In this way trees become the answer, the antidote, the life that embraces the earth, the path to healing.
Eelco Brand uses 3D software to reconstruct fragments of landscapes that in reality do not exist. We are dealing with digital constructions that are in fact immaterial. The process is the same both for the prints and for the animations, that do not have either a beginning or a narrative development and as a result can be seen and enjoyed as “moving pictures”.
Tree III by Jacob Hashimoto is a stylised tree made from pine wood and on the branches of which are opalescent luminous balls, digitally made and with a system of illumination. The idea of a sacred tree, brought back into our own times, offers a purposeful artificiality and is willingly unnatural. We are dealing with a complex process in which nature is idealised and then made real in a kind of real or virtual stylised funfair. On show, as a surprise, are also two previously unseen paintings.
The photography by Izima Kaoru seems a scene from a film. Everything is perfect and impeccable in the tiniest detail. The artist has asked the protagonists of his works to reveal to him the place they imagine for their death, the clothes they would like to wear, the position of the body. And so here the place, or rather the set, of an imaginary death is staged by the same model dressed in elegant and designer-signed clothes. The very title of the work seems in fact borrowed from a fashion show: Tanja de Jager wears Christian Dior. Here the tree is a natural element and, while it appears in all its extraordinary spontaneity, it is at the same time wrapped in the mystery of the universe.
The small canvases by Franco Passalacqua are views of the top of a robust and luxuriant vegetation that is more alive than ever. They are compact portions of trees, foliage, and woods all full of colour and the nature of which is almost able to offer us their scent and go far beyond their representation. These trees, reduced to atoms and then multiplied, invade the whole space right up to the edge of the picture, almost beyond the canvas, and they are a primary and essential element without any environmental reference.
For some time trees have been at the centre of the work by Lucas Reiner. In 2001 he began to paint the trees of Los Angeles, his city of birth, severely tested by their growth and the needs of civilisation. Their capacity to resist, to be stronger and more vital than their adversities, has become a tale of the complex relationship between humanity and nature.
Mario Schifano’s Palma is the image par excellence of the specific, pure and primordial tree. In his art the vital act of painting becomes as strong as the subject painted, which becomes real precisely because it is represented by the concrete action of mankind. It is he himself who confers substance onto the image made of canvas, paint, and gesture.
The art work by Giorgia Severi is profoundly linked to the natural world which is often offended and wounded by the behaviour of man. Her reflection starts from an awareness of the devastating role that mankind can have in the face of nature and calls for a sense of responsibility which humanity can make use of to preserve it. The work Calco in cellulosa del tronco di una Betulla Pendula, per preservarne la memoria has as its protagonist the “body” of the tree, of which memory must be preserved.
The work by Andre Woodward consists of a small tree planted in a cement cube. Here there is evident the idea of a fight that lies below natural balance and imbalance. The tree, through the strength of its roots, tries to make space in the cement and to live.