PENSIERO VIDEO. DISEGNO E ARTI ELETTRONICHE
Curated by Andreina Di Brino
An exhibition on the importance of drawing in the creative process and on its relationship with the electronic arts
Lucio Fontana, Hans Namuth – Paul Falkenberg – Jackson Pollock, Nam June Paik, Mario Schifano, Wolf Vostell, Gianni Toti, Fabrizio Plessi, Studio Azzurro, Bill Viola, William Kentridge, Grazia Toderi, Giacomo Verde, Michele Sambin, Nalini Malani, Quayola
21 October 2023 – 7 January 2024
Exhibition rooms – first floor
Complesso monumentale di San Micheletto
Via San Micheletto 3, Lucca
Lucca, 20 October 2023. How firm is the image on paper? And how is actually mobile the one mediated by the electronic devices? From 21 October 2023 to 7 January 2024, the Fondazione Centro Studi sull’Arte Licia e Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti – ETS presents “Pensiero video. Disegno e arti elettroniche”, curated by Andreina Di Brino. An exhibition – with the support of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca and of Banco BPM – that starts from the reflections of Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti on the importance of drawing as a crucial mean of the creative process. It offers a historical fresco on the dynamizing power of the sign, including drawings, documentation, video installations and video projections by Italian and international artists from the end of the 1940s of the XX century to the today digital art.
From the sketches to the articulation of details, from the autonomous drawings to the personally annotated studies, from the models to the “manifesto drawings”, on paper or on other supports with the same function, the exhibition unveils how the practice of drawing is the guardian of a multiplicity of factors, which mix, meet, clash intercept trends, social, cultural and politic implications, sometimes anticipating scenarios that do not yet exist.
The exhibition, which is part of the history of the institution, presided over Alberto Fontana, which, under the direction of Vittorio Fagone (2000-2007), gave specific attention to the video and electronic arts – presents works by Lucio Fontana, Hans Namuth – Paul Falkenberg – Jackson Pollock, Mario Schifano, Wolf Vostell, Gianni Toti, Fabrizio Plessi, Studio Azzurro, Bill Viola, William Kentridge, Grazia Toderi, Giacomo Verde, Michele Sambin, Nalini Malani, Quayola and of the “noble father” of the video experimentation Nam June Paik, whose extraordinary “Little Italy” (1990) is exhibited.
Authors who are different, far apart in time, geographic areas and training, but joined in a path of research tended to the return of a historical cross – section and to promoting an inedited retrospective look, which put in dialogue the personal and public sphere, the personal education of each artist and the evolution of the analogic and digital media, they chose to express themselves and to enrich their own research.
“Pensiero video. Disegno e arti elettroniche”, allows us to enter in a relationship with a temporality that is different from the “frozen” one of photography or from the “animated” one of the moving images.
If we accept the metaphor of the “time like a flow”, drawing, with its erasures, modifications, with the multiple and simultaneous assemblies of lines and signs, represents a model of “backbeat”. A backbeat that in the dialogue with the electronic works opens to a series of considerations on the image, on the gaze of the artists from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional plane of the finished work, in its composite declinations.
“Pensiero video. Disegno e arti elettroniche” highlights once again how for the Fondazione Ragghianti each exhibition represents an occasion and an instrument of knowledge and in-depth analysis on trends and genre that have not been sufficiently investigated or on lesser-known aspects of the activity of the artists, «Our Foundation, especially from the first decade of this century, from the exhibitions “Tempo sul tempo” (1999-2000), “Arte del video” (2004) and then Michael Snow (2007) and Jonas Mekas (2008), dedicated a special attention to the aesthetic expressions conveyed through the new media” – the director Paolo Bolpagni comments. «It is not a coincidence, since Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti was a great forerunner in the enhancement of the “Television as an artistic fact”, title of his unforgettable essay in 1955. Therefore, the exhibition, curated by Andreina Di Brino, places itself in a well determined groove, from a methodological and critic point of view, with an original accent and offers new key to understanding”.
The catalogue “Pensiero video. Disegno e arti elettroniche” edited by Andreina Di Brino and published by Edizioni Fondazione Ragghianti Studi sull’arte, accompanies the exhibition.
Biographical note on the curator
Andreina Di Brino is involved in aesthetics and languages of multimedia images with special reference to the relationship between traditional and electronic media, and to the analysis of the problems of conservation and enhancement of video-artistic materials.
She is professor of Analysis of image at Pisa University.
She published essays on video-art, contemporary art and on cinema for Lindau, Carocci, Charta, ETS, Polistampa, Edizioni Fondazione Ragghianti Studi sull’arte, Felici Editore, Pisa University Press, L’Harmattan, Cleup, Treccani and for specialized magazines.
Information
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