Untitled Views

Renata Fabbri arte contemporanea is delighted to announce the exhibition Untitled Views by Goldschmied & Chiari, curated by Gaspare Luigi Marcone.

The new series of works, Untitled Views (2017), by Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari, represents the prosecution of their artistic research of the last few years as well as an important point of arrival in both technical and conceptual terms.

Smoke, illusion, blurring, nebulosity – developed with video-photographic or installation techniques – have been elements present from the outset of their artistic partnership. In certain earlier works, these elements were associated with specific projects critically investigating the recent historical, political and sociological context, opening to reflection of an existential nature.

Untitled Views is an “absolute” series that from its very title is open to multiple interpretations. The artists present a new series of large and medium format “mirrors”. The variables of the double, the ambiguous and the complementary are fundamental given the artists’ status as a “duo”.

The works are mirrors to which photographs are fixed through an innovative and secret technique with something of the alchemical about it that manages to totally integrate the image with the mirror surface. The images themselves, the fruit of “performative” processes capture the nebulous dances of coloured “smokes” released from flares after a calibrated gestural action that is also charged with casual effects.

These visions may appear to be both external, atmospheric and natural landscapes and interior views in this case enhanced by the reflecting surface. The observer is an active and integrating part of their essence and becomes the subject of the work itself. The reflecting surface is a “threshold” between the imaginations of the artists and the spectators.

Out of the polychromy and the polysemy emerge direct and indirect allusions – from 19th century view painting to some of the abstract-informal painting of the 20th century – as well as the notes and centuries-old metaphors of mirrors in western art, which moreover have taken concrete form in recent decades in the material and objectual use of reflecting surfaces. Luminous works – with obvious references to the etymological value of the word “photograph” – that variously embrace atmospheres from the coldest to the warmest.

These vaporous presences may become a correlative of thought and spirit, of dream and recollection, of a faded memory and of a future to be discovered.
An alternative reading has a mythological-anthropological key. In certain cultural contexts, as is well known, the mirror is seen as a magical and ritual object. Primary suggestions are, furthermore, the natural vapours released from the great belly of mother earth, as in the volcanic phenomena rich in ancestral references. Allusions that travel from the sulphurous image of the Campi Flegrei to the vapours of the Delphic Pythia, the priestess of Apollo.