LINEA MENTIS
From 11/02/2011 To 30/04/2011
Friday 11 February 2011, from 18.00 to 21.00: a new exhibition space for contemporary art will be inaugurated in Turin, the Raffaella De Chirico Galleria d’Arte, via Vanchiglia, 11/A.
It has been decided to open the new space with a group show, Linea Mentis, a title and concept ideally linking and expressing the research of three artists: Irma Blank, Eva Sørensen and Gaspare.
While maintaining well-defined autonomous approaches, the three artists see the “line” as writing, gesture and sign, an original and definitive creative instrument, a metaphor of being and void, of thought and action. The line investigates personal time, space and memory.
Irma Blank (1934) has continually analysed the ontology of writing. Her works have been exhibited in leading museums throughout the world and international events such as the Venice Biennale in 1978 and Documenta in Kassel in 1977.
In the cycle Avant-Testo, the German artist creates whirling rhythms with bundles of lines in shades of blue; the written sign is restored to its alogical, absolute primordial origin; the essence of the inexpressible. The rotary effect is achieved with both hands, a kinetic movement producing self-referential signs. The signs winds around and references itself, becoming the sole epiphany of the perfect symbiosis between mind and body. Linea Mentis will feature large format works and others of smaller dimensions. A number of Blank’s works were recently added to the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and presented in the thematic and chronological review elles@centrepompidou, the exhibition Artistes femmes dans les collections du Centre Pompidou and Les collections contemporaines “au feminin”, de 1960 à nos jours, to which Giulia Lamoni, author of the critical text in the Linea Mentis catalogue, contributed as an assistant.
For decades Eva Sørensen (1940) has been incising fragments of marble and granite; in parallel her drawings in ink on paper have become stenographical notes to her consciousness. A major exhibition of sculptures and drawings was staged in the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1982.
The black lines appear to have been executed with an almost mechanical hand. The clarity of the idea, of the mental design, is manifest in an extremely precise and rigorous gesture. Even though visually the compositions may recall mineral veining or geological stratifications, what emerges with great force in her dark waves is the “conceptual construct”. This exhibition features medium format recent drawings (2008) and a number of historic works from 1972.
In the series Grafica, Gaspare (1983), artist and critic, has attempted to go beyond and annul his personal culture; he writes and then turns the paper and “overwrites” the same text four times; the text that originally had a logical-rational significance is transformed into a tangle of black ink. A chaos that contains order. Similarly, the idea of stratification and linear composition is employed in the series Opera; amalgamating heterogeneous elements and the ashes of his own works realised through to 2008 and then burnt, he creates black squares, metaphors of universal and material synthesis. A principal of self-annulment. An active and cyclical nihilism.