Cassina Projects is pleased to announce Fluuuuuido, a group exhibition featuring works by Sara Birns, Daria Dmytrenko, Delphine Hennelly and Léo Luccioni.
The show, curated by Edoardo Monti, meditates on the possibility to make time more fluid trough art, in a dialogue between artists, practices and ideas.
Let's not be fooled by appearances. Let us cross the surface of the figure, let us go beyond it. We are bombarded with figures and images. They don't even have the time to hit us and we have already forgotten them. Let us rather focus on the movements, the gestures, the brushstrokes (sometimes exaggerated, sometimes microscopic) to fully appreciate this mutant exhibition.
Sara Birns (1992, California, USA) takes us on a dreamlike trip. We walk over a thin thread, stretched between the mystical and the infamous, between Heaven and Hell. In Birns' purgatory we find the artist surrounded by family, friends and people met by chance, whose remixed faces give birth to new individuals inhabiting a surreal world. The data used to identify themselves are distorted, conflicting emotions coexist on the same face. A paradox emerges: is it possible to completely capture an individual's character? Maybe Birns succeeds in revealing ways of interpreting invisible forces that are just beyond matter that our human eyes can detect.
After Sara we move on to Delphine Hennelly (1979, Canada), flying from the heat of California to the austerity of Montreal, although the journey reflected in the works of the two painters appears to be reversed. We are overwhelmed by soft palettes, mountains of fragrant, three-dimensional oil, geometries that become filters applied to the composition. Mother and son, their relationship. They are here to stay, they are explored throughout the canvases. Hugs, caresses, play, intimacy, love. Paintings seemingly manifest, actually mysterious. After seeing them again and again, another study will surface another obvious detail hitherto hidden from view. Drawing, pure and genuine, is a key element in Hennelly's works, a useful tool to anchor the concept to the form, able to twist the very nature of the painting to meet a graphic need by imitating techniques of reproduction such as printing, ink, doodling.
From Montreal to Brussels. Common denominator: French. Léo Luccioni (1994, France) lives and works in Belgium. The artist adopts an interdisciplinary practice, eclectic but at the same time coherent. He profanes without desecrating, rather he makes the ordinary sacred. The names of famous brands are raised to Gods, decanted in Gregorian chants. Mastro Lindo is a Buddhist holy man, probably vegan. The proposed set-up for an exhibition (dreamed of or yearned for) at the New York spaces of the Guggenheim or Marian Goodman gallery becomes itself a work in which minute graphite interventions animate the paper. Who knows whether osmosis contributed to give Luccioni a kind of Flemish vein. Common objects from daily life are reincarnated into relics. Luccioni charges them with new meanings, calling into question the status our society assigns to them.
Last but not least, Daria Dmitrenko (1993, Ukraine), with whom our journey turns east. "Preparatory drawings," "rehearsals," and "sketches" are words that do not exist in Daria's vocabulary. The artist prioritizes improvisation, the subconscious and its visual expression, deep and ancient memories that take shape with agility, new mythologies about the future rooted in the past. Dmitrenko engages in a real struggle against painting: the canvas is often turned, the shapes are altered several times, the colors change... until, capitulating, the only thing left is surrender to the enemy force. From the final chromatic solution shines a well-defined atmosphere, at times calm, at others excited. From chaos comes a balanced yet unstable calm, behind which are the gazes of figures watching and judging us.
The different stories coming from these four corners of the world contribute-each in its own way-to make time elastic, fluid, veeeeery fluuuid.
Edoardo Monti
