Francesco Gennari: Galleria Zero.
Verzotti, Giorgio
Contemporary artists tend to reject the view that an artist is some
exalted, exceptional personality who, out of nothing, creates something
highly significant to the rest of the world; today this concept is
considered too aristocratic or belatedly Romantic. But among some young
Italian artists, including Francesco Gennari, the idea seems to be
making a comeback. Clearly, this position implies a bit of
egocen-trism--an attitude confirmed by the rather cryptic press release
for Gennari's recent exhibition, in which the artist went so far as
to use the word demiurge to describe himself.
The show's title, "7 enigmi per il mio loden" (7
Riddles for My Loden Overcoat), refers to six elegant, gold-plated coat
hangers affixed to the wall, each of a different shape, and titled
Enigma 1, Enigma 2, and so on (all works 2006). On one of these, the
artist hung his overcoat. That action, which took place at the opening,
was not intended as a performance but as an act of establishment, which
therefore cannot be repeated once it has been carried out. (The artist
refused to repeat the gesture with a different coat hanger when I
suggested it.) According to the press release, hanging the coat is the
equivalent of "applying a concept, projecting thought to the
matter, to give it meaning, function, shape, in synthesis,
determination." Thus, there is really nothing superhuman after all
about the action of this demiurge--the form assumes a function after the
material has assumed a form: The sculpture becomes a clothes stand. The
universe that the demiurge creates is a small universe of microevents, a
shaping of form through a new organization of material. In other words,
Gennari's project is about the genesis of a work of art, understood
in a rather traditional manner.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The show included two additional pieces, called self-portraits.
Autoritratto tra un qua-drato e un triangolo (Self-Portrait between a
Square and a Triangle), a small-scale sculpture in black marble, placed
on the floor, has an elongated shape that begins as a parallelepiped and
ends as a pyramid. This solidification of the "space" between
a square and a triangle represents "the place where the demiurge
desired to spend part of his time in the guise of gin"; indeed,
this alcohol has been poured over the sculpture. In fact, gin is one of
the substances with which this demiurge is identified or symbolized (gin
is a "spirit," as they say in both Italian and English). In
the second self-portrait, Autoritratto con (Self-Portrait with), the two
manifestations come together in a photograph of a man, seen from behind,
wearing a loden coat and holding a bottle of gin in his hand.
Plato wrote that the demiurge gives form to preexisting eternal
ideas and thus projects a universe that is just and beautiful and tends
toward the common good. It will be interesting to see whether Gennari,
the self-proclaimed artist-demiurge, will be able to move on from the
hermetic premise of his work and do good within a cynical art system.
--Giorgio Verzotti
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
