Fabio Zonta
SR Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the group exhibition Wunderkammer der Natur, featuring eight gallery artists:Alessandra Baldoni, Maura Banfo, Francesco Bocchini, Franco Fontana, Giancarlo Marcali, Ivan Piano, Luzia Simons, Fabio Zonta and guest designers: Simona Rinciari, Superfluoo Design.
The Wunderkammer der Natur curated bySabrina Raffaghellowill run from April 18,2018 – March 20, 2018 with an opening receptionWednesday, April 18th from 4:00 – 8:00 p.m.
This special exhibition for the gallery weekend that running at SR Contemporary Art in Berlin, sets out to put nature in contemporary art. While displaying visual art also raises the question of how art deals with nature. Wunderkammer der Naturrefers to works that express “the relationship between nature, environment and artists”, and serves both aesthetic and researches functions. This exhibition features artists who have created their own interpretations of their experiences by working through their theories of nature and natural occurrences while allowing nature to take a supporting role. From the complex relationship between man and nature, the exhibition investigates the era of globalization and the use of new technologies in a presentation tackling and exploring themes such as ecology, memories and recycle. Nature reveals a new paradigm of art and its contemporary beauty.
The approach of Alessandra Baldoni is the impossibility of photography to tell the truth. Having abandoned all documentary aspirations, the photography by Alessandra Baldoni is a visual metaphor that, yes, establishes a strong link with the world’s forms, but with the single desire to allude to reality, perhaps evoke it and then transform it into a powerful, tormenting, sometimes dangerous appearance, recollection, memory.
Maura Banfo the Nest – explains the artist – is the projection of the concept of home, theenvelope that somehow each of us carries around, through our own memory. Places live in time, spaces are transformed and shaped by the experience of the moment. “The time of the places” wants to underline just how a place can change according to the fruition that is made of it. In this context, NIDO, the living image par excellence, tells its story and its memory. Intimacy and majesty are compared on tiptoe, in the silence of a place that invites almost to meditation, returning a dimensional relationship with what surrounds us. Nature lives around us and inside us.
Francesco Bocchini there is a bit of madness in contemporary art that corresponds with theidea of art itself or on its borders. Transforming the material, the banalest, into something different, is a dream that often caressed the twentieth century. Francesco Bocchini makes an apparently simple and damn complicated operation to carry out. To do anything into something. It is a process that rarely succeeds, a little like alchemy or at least alchemy linked to art. The transmutation of the banalities in art, Marcel Duchamp master obviously from the height of its Pissoir, is not for everyone, precisely because many try it. Ferrous scrap that becomes poetic elementary mechanisms. Poor materials that are sublimated in sophisticated colours and existential allusions, always ironic. The sense of play that becomes the drama in the jerky movement and the harsh noise of metals. Whole shelves that invent parts of the body, objects of desire, objects. Leaves and metallic flowers of absolute beauty, which open unexpected blooms in silent walls and showcases.
Franco Fontana looking at his images and at the sensitivity inherent in his work, we canspeak of zen photography. In fact, with his minimalist photographs, Franco Fontana has touched the abstract world and the purity contained today in a few contemporary images. By removing all that was superfluous he managed to give added value to his landscapes. Yes, we talk about “his” landscapes as the photographer has succeeded, through his eyes, to create his own unique and unmistakable style. The contrasts gave light, the bright colours of southern Italy and the shadows in the right places, have given life to the essentiality of its landscapes. The camera and the photographer himself are an inseparable unit and thanks to this, Franco Fontana has managed to achieve perfection in his work. A perfection that the same landscape has helped to create. It is enough to read the photographer's thought to reach the same dimension that led him to immortalise landscapes that speak of symmetry, sign and purity. As one of the master italian photographer, he succeeds to make visible the invisible.
Giancarlo Marcali the artist's expressive means are constantly changing: from man – sizedpaintings to sculptures, with a strong architectural value to visual poetry. The words of Giancarlo Marcali tell of a person in love with creating, the act of expressing himself and freely deciding, the material appropriates these flavors: and every time that the whims find and take a form, things have the ability to transform that that one perceives them, and perhaps here lies the essence of beauty. The artist questioning the nature of a conceptual vision, the sentence A Rose is a rose closes inside its roots the force to hurt and free through art and poetry.
Ivan Piano Eros and Thanatos gathered in a logic of absences and non – places that take overand flow into a completely surprising image in the results; results that go well beyond the constructive logic and break the conventional aesthetic canons to propose a reality divided between abstract forms and fluctuating dimensions of a real parallel, where dream and madness seem to meet between the notes of songs borrowed from the Anglo – Saxon electronic music. This is not through the important component of authorizing a ghost, allows Ivan Piano to produce extremely refined, conceptual works, where Nature in the creative act in all its parts goes to merge into its ego as if to bring back the myth of the mirror which reflects hidden and mysterious worlds. This is the thought of an ambivalent artist who encloses not only himself or his self – representation, but all the heroic and epic digressions of a generation that grew up at the turn of the '80s and' 90s, escaping reality of the image shown at all costs by means of a self – denial, flaking the usual search for the beautiful absolute with the perimeter doubt of the uncertain and the spectral disguise. This reveals the disturbing and absolute works of Ivan Piano, a free spirit who, through a long journey even among his loved ones, literature, music and nature, arrives at the perigee of himself with the deformation and defragmentation of the image, to reveal a brilliant soul to us.
The work of Luzia Simons is located precisely at this interface between the obvious and the cultural code, naked reproduction and metaphor. Using modern scanning techniques, the artist produces images of flowers. In this way, her images not only come to include the ideal forms of blossoming beauty but also faults, malfunctions and the start of irrevocable decay. Luzia Simons’ art, however, is not primarily concerned with the warning of vanitas – the reminder of the transience of all being in the old paintings –, but with the rather rambling tale of a cultural symbol. The tulip thus becomes a metaphor for mobility, globalisation and intercultural identity. Once the much sought-after flower was worth its weight in gold and developed into a cultural symbol in both the Occident and Orient. Originating from the Orient, it was brought to Europe and altered by cultivation in Holland; finally, it returned to its ancient origins in new varieties – thus becoming an example of cultural migration, a symbol of exchange and of insidious changes in aesthetic significance. Nothing seems to be as peaceful as a still life, and yet this genre is no less than a provocation. The glossily brilliant dutch paintings – in which shop window displays, fruit and vegetables resemble a demonstration of the power of painting skills – actually convey deeper moral messages, bluntly reminding the suitably educated observer of his transience. But today’s art historians cannot agree on quite how much literary sermon is concealed in this kind of painting, and to what extent they were simply a bigoted excuse to go on producing glossy painted surfaces with impunity.
The images of Fabio Zonta investigate atomistic thought in its purely aesthetic meaning, focusing on the close up of the natural elements that seem to best represent the continuous exhaustion and regeneration of life in reproductive processes. Fabio Zonta's decades long career sees him engaged in a personal research on the theme of democritian atomism. The images of Fabio Zonta investigate atomistic thought in its purely aesthetic meaning, focusing on the close-up of the natural elements that seem to best represent the continuous exhaustion and regeneration of life in reproductive processes. “Paeonia” and “Chrysanthemum” are the eloquent titles of the series of photographs dedicated to the flowers of the same name, all immortalized in the fleeting moment that separates the maximum flowering from the subsequent withering.
Fabio Zonta represents his subjects with the scientific precision of the orthogonal projection, alternating sequences of zenith looks with others of lateral views, which predispose the natural elements to the rigorous analysis by a look that questions the processes of nature. The object is always placed in a position of the highest level with respect to the objective, which at the single instant of the shot returns its infinite constitutive complexity with a crystalline definition. The photographer, therefore, essentially performs a careful observation that allows him to grasp the moment, the here and now of the passage of a witness in the perennial relay between the life that fades and the one that will flow from his seeds. On the other hand, Fabio Zonta is not limited to the realistic reproduction of this crucial moment; on the contrary, as soon as he succeeds in taking possession of it, he immediately subjects it to a process of abstraction and de – realization, with the whiteness of the white background or with the black that seems to impose an unattainable distance between the object taken in the moment and the other infinite moments of his natural life.
SR Contemporary Art was founded in Milan by Sabrina Raffaghello in 2001 as a platformfor exhibiting contemporary and historical positions in Italian photography. SR has since expanded has opened up the scope to international artists working in photography, multimedia and visual arts, while still remaining true to its original, core version. Has opened up the scope to international artists working in photography, multimedia and visual arts. In 2017 the gallery moved its headquarters from Milan to Berlin. Berlin was chosen, in fact, as a privileged place in comparison with the international market and among the different european souls, as well as for the nature of the crossroads of cultural flows between East and West – to which the gallery is historically linked. At the same time, however, Berlin means always having an eye open on one of the key laboratories of the worlds artistic trends – a true router for the elaboration and production of contemporary languages.
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