huesos de bambú

Dear Massimo,

many apologies for my delay. Writing these notes has taken more time than expected. The reason is that there have been many versions of this show and by extension, any attempt to annotate and describe a definitive reading has felt unnatural. These notes are about some of these versions rather than about the works, acknowledging that there is still one last iteration to be produced during the montage.

First there was your studio visit, which provided me of a first schema for the show. With this in mind I decide to develop certain ideas that were hidden behind the works you and Alessandra saw. At the time we were developing at the studio a savoir faire in relation to a new group of plaster sculptures, most of which had to do with pressuring and extending the surface of objects. The act of stressing a material until it reveals an unexpected reaction was (and is) at the core of most works and has been a running thread for the show. Same goes for the idea that most works come from the re-assemblage of broken pieces.

At some point during the process I decided to have a look at Scarpa’s Gypsoteca Canoviana as a way to understand the rapport between plaster, support and space. A group of new ideas sprang from the relation between Scarpa’s display system and Canova’s sculptures of bodies and heads (at some point I imagined the show being about the co-dependance between the body and the different things we use to hold ourselves up). I altered the Scarpa reference by drawing curves on a couple of his designs to be then re-produced by hand, if only to encourage possible imprecisions. My way of stating what today is perhaps obvious: everything is a product of mestizaje*.

After extending the date of the opening, I had the chance of reviewing what has been done and decided to open up the process. I was producing the green ‘acid works’ in denim that felt to me extremely somatic and had an air of post-war painting. In response I decided to include as part of the show a very Psycho-geometrical fabric I had seen and bought during last year visit to Peru. These works were intended to be very light, precarious even, somehow representing the two hemispheres always at play in my work. By including them, I tried to create a sort of dialectical trap as you move through the works: things that come from different directions being paired in a common space. In fact, this is probably the only real version of huesos de bambú: the show as a ‘dialectical trap’.

Un abrazo and see you tomorrow

X

a

p.s. Massimo, use this text as you wish.

*the mixing of different cultures that give birth at new one.