Venezia

Venice is an artwork itself.
Every time I am there, I have the sensation that normally you have in a museum: a mix of sense of reverence and excitement. You feel small and not important but you also feel like you want to see everything, and fast.

I used the occasion to visit the new contemporary art centre, the 'Punta della Dogana', time ago a warehouse of salt and now a foundation by Francois Pinault. It is located in a monumental triangular building, that has been renovated by Japanese architect Tadao Ando.



The place is incredible, and also the artworks.
This is the first room of the museum:
at the end on the right, hanging on the wall, the horse by Maurizio Cattelan,
I've seen it for the first time at the Biennale of 2001, always a strong impact.
Then, on the right near of us, a canvas by one of my favourite artists in the last period,
Luc Tuymans, who creates big canvas with representation of still life on a monochrome and bright background. Dazzling glimmer versus visual aggression of today's media world.



Here below there is the image of another artwork that I found interesting:
Richard Hughes, Crash My Party You Bastards.



At first, I didn't notice the face created with parts of object of a destroyed room, but a viewer like me told me to do a back step, and suddently I could see it. Brilliant!

Napoli

Naples, what a city! People are smiling all the time. At first you feel uncomfortable when a person start to chat with you without any reason, but then you realize it's just their way to be...so different from London!
Naples is a beautiful city, full of history and art, with amazing parks and a lovely seaside.
In Naples there is also a very good and big Contemporary Art Museum.
Its name is Madre (in Italian, mother).


An art installation by Bianco-Valente, called Relational, in the yard of the museum.

What surprised me in this Museum was the huge presence of works by Damien Hirst, really impressive, I've never seen so many, and all together!
Except this, I was delighted to see their collection: Anish Kapoor, Jannis Kounnelis, Georg Baselitz, Mimmo Paladino, Francesco Clemente, Vanessa Beecroft and many others...
In the museum, they also organize night with DJ and cinema screening...amazing!!
When I was inside, I discovered that the exhibition continued in the adjacent deconsecrated church. I was suprised. In a city still so traditional, where the biggest attraction are monuments from the past as churches, castles or monasteries, it is strange to see a church used as a contemporary art location.
Anyway, my surprise didn't end here. I entered and I've seen a piece by Maurizio Cattelan hanging down in the altar. Cattelan is well known for being a provocateur, but he always does it in a smart and unexpected way.
Well, to see this artwork inside a church in Naples was a strong experience for me. I sudden thought: this must have created loads of polemics. When I came back in my hotel, I checked in the Internet and actually what I thought was true. Cattelan's piece didn't get a lot of support from Naples.



I discovered that Cattelan took the image from a picture of the artist Francesca Woodman, famous for her black and white photographs featuring herself, who died in 1981 for suicide.



In the first exhibition, the artwork didn't have the box all around. But then Cattelan saw it packaged, and he understood this was the finished work.

In Italy sometimes things are really predictable. I knew this artwork was criticized, even if I still don't understand why. I know it is a strong image, but not stronger than some olden painting with martyrs rapresented.
But for a contemporary critique artwork, doubt and disdain are automatic as a matter of course.

Food for Thought

The Museum of Everything

To start with, I have to say I consider the title of this exhibition as really inappropriate. It should be something like ‘Inside Outsider art’ or ‘Museum of the Outcasts’, well, something more challenging at least! But anyway...

The Museum of Everything was a temporary museum located in Chalk Farm where all the artwork displayed were made by artists often not recognized as such. Essentially, all artworks were made by, let’s say, ‘normal people’ and not worldly notorious artists. Therefore, their works are way more personal and intimate of the ones that we can contemplate in a normal museum. Jean Dubuffet was the discoverer and the main fan of the art described as art brut, a term coined by Dubuffet himself. The French artist wrote about Outsider art:
"Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere – are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professionals. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade."

I think I am really near to his position, above all nowadays, when the mainstream art market is so wide that every artist, as soon as he is recognized, becomes a sort of celebrity. Taking the example of Damien Hirst. He is maybe very talented, but in my opinion the sudden success made him lose the honesty. I think his works are spoiled by a system that asks him for this. He should use his talent to actually communicate something to the viewer, but I don’t see any message in his works, just ostentation and superficiality.

Well, in the Museum of Everythink you definitely cannot find this. All artworks were created from a genuine impulse, a real need to express what’s inside, in the unconsciousness. All artists are persons that never met success thanks to their works; they simply had the unavoidable necessity to create. Most of them are complicated and troubled minds, such as the first that was considered as an outsider artist, that was Adolf Wölfli, a psychotic mental patient that in the 1920s created an immense quantity of outstanding drawings. This is one of them:

In the Museum there were few works made by an artist that I love. She’s Judith Scott, a woman that was born deaf and with Down Syndrome. At the age of 44, she started making those incredible sculptures just taking an object and wrapping it in many layers of coloured yarns. The results are something beautiful and creepy at the same time.

Judith Scott, Untitled (JS-9), 2005, fibre and found objects

Another impressive example of outsider art is Nek Chand’s work. He created a monumental rock garden in the remote city of Chandigarh north of Delhi, India. Collecting broken plates, bowls, bottle tops from the railway tracks, he built day after day sculptures of different figures. When the municipality first discovered his illegal work, they wanted to destroy it. But then they recognized the beauty and importance of this creation and supported him with assistants and a stipend. Now the place in India is very famous and highly visited by art-lover tourists from all over the world.

When I was living in Madrid, I attended a course about Outsider Art. From that point I started being very interested about the issue. And I discovered a different perspective to look at art. Moreover, it actually changed my conception of art. Now I concieve art as something that a person can have or not. Is something like a divine gift. And some people can have it, but waste it because they don't know how to listen to the divine they have in themselves.
Artists in the Museum of Everything knew how to listen.
They knew the silence of the solitude.