Cassina Projects is pleased to present Area Caproni U8OPIA, an exhibition conceived by the dialogue between Louisa Clement and Georg Herold. Belonging to different generations, the German artists exhibit together and in Milano for the first time.
Developing through the two floors of the gallery, the exhibition reveals a transient world populated by humanoid figures suggesting new mechanisms to regulate life. Their recent artworks, some of which never exhibited before, engage an interactive questioning in which way encounters between humans, their bodies and life cycles are evolving.
Approaching their work with different media Louisa Clement and Georg Herold open an intensive dialogue creating tension between the dynamics of human's life we acknowledge and their evolution we pretend to ignore.
Louisa Clement works with photography, video, sculpture and VR (virtual reality) metaphorically analysing the objectification of the human body, through new ways of representing the human figures. In her photographic work the subject is a mannequin as reflection of people's perception identity and as a symbol of the multiple personalities with which people identify themselves.
In the artist's series Avatar, photographs of brightly hued mannequins', taken with her iPhone camera, dehumanize the diversity of bodies while the seriality of similar poses anonymizes the human being. Seductively looking, Clement's work hardly defines the borders between photography and painting, where the dissolution of defined structures is an essential moment of her practice.
The research of new meanings and interpretations of the human body continues in Georg Herold's work representing hyper naturally twisted anthropomorphic figures. Surrealistically oversized humanoid bodies, or portions such as legs or arms, ambiguously transmit controversial emotions of extreme pain or sublime ecstasy. Composed of canvases stretched on planks of wood, bronze, foam or bare wood, the bodies are arrested in the moment of action, as if in an ironic or sexually provocative pose. The narrative of the exhibition develops toward the deconstruction of physicality.
As in the lath-paintings made by roof battens which imagery raise memories of the 8bit graphic computer language, that transform the role of canvas by changing it into a support that outspreads from the frame into the picture, assembled with photographic colored paper, tights and other lower grade materials which he has been working since the 80's.
The ongoing investigation of humanoid figures and the dynamics of interactions between human beings push its boundaries in the new sculptural work Mold by Louisa Clement. The bronze artwork is a mold of a sex doll belonging to a new generation of luxury sex toys, provided with an artificial intelligence, which allows the doll to learn and memorize the preferences of the users and interacts with them in order to achieve a new level of experience. This process of replacement of a living partner directly relates with the new photographs. Framed with the camera of her smartphone the artist realized that the negative volume of the sculpture becomes positive. Within the artist's interest of the digitalized social media era, this work becomes a metaphor of Instagram profiles, which are able to fulfill people life.
The interference between physical transformation and digital reaches its highest expression in the video work Circling Head by Louisa Clement, where a video of a mannequin head rotates in loop provoking in the viewer a sense of nihilism and unstoppable disturbance.
Through new ways of representing the human figures, Area Caproni U8OPIA plays with the perception of art leaving the visitors wondering the meaning of physicality and virtual despite virtual wouldn't exist without physical.
