Motif

An art exhibition is first and foremost a mental vision, a concept that links the works together and through them, attempts to give a meaningful structure to the world. It is therefore the visual content of an insight that the artist conveys through the medium of painting, among other means, and its capacity to translate thought. Working from this observation, Paolo Chiasera suggests extending the range of painterly genres to include curatorial practices, translating the content of the exhibition into the code of painting, into an “exhibition painting”, a show that operates within the framework of representation. Like any exhibition, it includes works by various artists, but by focusing on the concept, it fruitfully sets itself apart from various artistic experiments in appropriation and reappropriation.

The freedom of expression offered by the mediation of painting is what unshackles the exhibition, and its concept, from all limitations, so that it can reconstruct itself within the sphere of the canvas as a realm of imagination and emancipation, as a proposition that the viewer’s mind is invited to tackle, bringing the experience of the show to completion on its own. Through images, the exhibition painting—of which Motif is an integral part—thus seems to take Lawrence Weiner’s ideas about the role of the viewer to a radical extreme, combining them with the cognitive explorations of Aby Warburg’s Atlas, and further complicating the unstable relationship that exists between language and its context, between nature and culture, between similarity and simile.

Motif includes works by Karla Black, Jeroen De Rijke/Willem De Rooij, Giulio Paolini, Paola Pivi, Ugo Rondinone, Sterling Ruby, and Ettore Spalletti.