“Shelter all the pictures of language
and make use of them, for they’re within the desert,
the place you should go looking for them.”
—Jean Genet
The exhibition third Mild is devoted to the work of the identical title by artist Paul Chan (Hong Kong, 1973 – who lives and works in New York). Via video, installations, and drawings, Chan has emerged internationally as probably the most unique and visionary voices in modern artwork. His works mix collectively an unprecedented relational aesthetic with philosophical reflections on life, politics, faith, and want. Though a number of items in his oeuvre initially seem colourful and playful (equivalent to Happiness (lastly) after 35,000 years of civilization; Breathers), Chan’s imagery belongs to a darker realm – a world whose visions evoke a violent, anguished area marked by desolate, apocalyptic atmospheres. His visible universe unfolds in a state of perpetual disaster, dangerously echoing the trajectory of our current.
The work on show, marking the Basis’s third exhibition devoted to the Bonollo Assortment, was acquired in 2006 and is a part of the expansive, chapter-based cycle The 7 Lights (2005–07), one in every of Chan’s most formidable and groundbreaking tasks. Launched in 2005, the cycle combines out of date pc expertise with hypnotic imagery to stage a collection of enigmatic encounters with mild and darkness. Offered at biennials and exhibitions at a world scale, items from the Lights collection have captured the eye of critics and worldwide audiences, regardless that they’ve not often been proven in Italy. The collection includes large-scale projections and digital drawings. Chan’s animations abound with visions that may be interpreted as idyllic or apocalyptic, utopian or tragic. The seven works appear to evoke a hallucinatory rendition of the biblical account of creation in seven days. Concurrently, Chan’s oeuvre conjures recollections of a number of tragic occasions from fashionable historical past over the previous thirty years, such because the terrorist assaults of September 11, 2001, the battle in Iraq, and the relentless outbreaks of violence worldwide.
Within the title, the phrase “mild” (which in Italian is “luce”) is crossed out. Drawing consideration to its dramatic absence, Chan explains: “What I present are projections of sunshine and shadows, and shadow is erased mild”. The six projections are immersed in silence, seemingly supposed to create an area for philosophical, non secular, and aesthetic contemplation. Every projection lasts about fourteen minutes earlier than restarting in an infinite loop, punctuated by monochromatic waves of heat reds and yellows that steadily yield to black, distinct shapes floating throughout the floor. In distinction, the seventh work within the collection consists of summary drawings on paper supposed for musical manuscripts. Amidst explosions, wreckage, and drifting particles, Chan tears on the margins of the spectacle of demise – so central to the media panorama in current a long time – by means of a stream of photos filtered by his personal dreamlike creativeness.
Taken collectively, the Lights compress and animate photos of the previous and current into crisp, fleeting shadows, creating an expansive cycle of destruction and rebirth projected onto flooring, corners, and partitions. Moderately than merely evoking photos from cinema screens or televisions, they recall the interaction of sunshine because it filters by means of a window. Every Mild begins with a peaceful rhythm, however steadily the ambiance shifts: human silhouettes, animals, and on a regular basis objects rise into the air, as if possessed by darkish forces, solely to plunge into the void or be sucked out of view.
In third Mild, the work right here on show, the distorted and trembling photos of the animations appear to emerge from a post-nuclear ambiance. That is essentially the most intense and extraordinary piece in your entire collection, the place the artist performs with the seductive pressure of images and the traumatic sensation of an inescapable apocalypse already in progress. Distinctive throughout the cycle for having its photos projected onto the ground, the work additional amplifies the viewers’s disorientation: one is left with the impression of standing on the sting of a precipice, even because the figures observe each other in a hypnotic succession and the ambiance fully engulfs us. By rejecting the frontality of typical projection and as an alternative utilizing the ground because the floor alongside which silhouettes glide, Chan additionally tempers the violence of photos usually emitted by a pc monitor or tv, unveiling his meticulous exploration of recent strategies for displaying shifting photos. On this depiction of catastrophe, an unsettling wind regularly blows because the artist sifts by means of his imagery looking for parts to craft new visions. One can witness mundane objects—a pitcher, cups, an outsized fork – and varied helpless animals, together with a canine stubbornly resisting gravity earlier than lastly succumbing to exhaustion, all drifting throughout the ground.
third Mild can also be the one work within the collection during which the artist incorporates a tangible object—a protracted picket desk—a reference drawn from Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated portray The Final Supper, created between 1494 and 1498. With the intention to reproduce it faithfully, Chan traveled to Milan, the place the portray is housed, and studied it meticulously to create a reproduction primarily based on its unique proportions. One other distinctive side of the work is its segmented picture, divided into three elements, as if we have been witnessing mild and shadow filtering by means of the grand window of an imposing cathedral. The piece emanates a perverse pressure between distant universes; on one hand, it envelops us in a meditative and ecstatic calm as the pictures movement and the colours shift, whereas on the opposite, we’re overtaken by a lyrically anxious resignation, a trauma that reminds us of the fragility of the human essence in its most elementary wants. It’s by means of such a pressure between the traumatic consciousness that the world might need reached its finish and the just about innate urgency to assemble new narratives to reimagine the longer term, that Chan’s creative follow acquires an uncontrollable prophetic power. In flip, it propels the general public towards the rebirth of creativeness by means of the unstoppable movement of hallucinations and premonitions to which the artist topics the viewers along with his visionary energy.
The cycle The 7 Lights additionally conveys a story wealthy in historic and creative references, together with historical Greek mythology and Baroque portray. Whereas on the heart of the cycle there’s a sturdy non secular symbolism – utilized by Chan as an imaginative drive, a instrument to open new methods of inventing and describing our current – it doesn’t lack a number of references to main figures in artwork historical past, starting with Caravaggio and his iconic use of sunshine. Chan borrows a number of citations from the iconography of the Ascension and the Final Judgment, the place vortices of human and celestial our bodies rise into the sky or plunge into the inferno. Among the many figures that the majority encourage Chan’s conceptual and visible follow are the poets and writers Robert Walser, Henry Michaux, Colette and Samuel Beckett; in addition to Mark Twain, Karl Kraus, Georges Bataille, and Voltaire; the painters William Blake and Francisco Goya, and the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who profoundly influences his aesthetic lexicon. These references reveal Chan’s inexhaustible want to embrace and describe the violence and complexity of actuality, in addition to his distinctive means to depict an alternate world by means of the facility of invention and the liberty of poetry.
Thus, the exhibition third Mild represents a singular alternative to discover the world of an artist whose animations confront a number of the themes characterising historical past and human nature. By combining photos of stark simplicity with elaborate reflections on the thought of illumination, the passage of time, and the illustration of catastrophe, the work—which transforms the Basis’s areas into an immersive surroundings during which the general public is invited to enterprise forth, abandoning any consciousness of time and area—presents itself as an enigmatic encounter with the lights and shadows of our time. Trapped in an infinite repetition that renders them each unsettling and reassuring, the Lights recommend that maybe there isn’t any true finish, however solely an everlasting starting, very like the relentless motion of a clock’s arms.
It’s by means of this reflection directed towards the development of future worlds and the position that artwork can assume in such a generative follow that the phrases of the celebrated American creator Ursula Okay. Le Guin, spoken throughout one in every of her most incisive addresses at Stanford College in 1981, resound with drive: ““An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a short while. For so long as it takes to have a look at or hearken to or watch or learn the murals. Like a crystal, the murals appears to include the entire, and to suggest eternity. And but all it’s is an explorer’s sketch-map. A chart of shorelines on a foggy coast. […] “To make a brand new world you begin with an previous one, definitely. To discover a world, perhaps you need to have “misplaced one. Perhaps you need to be misplaced. The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was all the time danced right here on the fringe of issues, on the brink, on the foggy coast”1
—Chiara Nuzzi
at Fondazione Sandra e Giancarlo Bonollo, Vicenza
till Could 24, 2025
