Interview with Olaf Nicolai by Luca Vitiello
The Third Tiger Searching for a definition of what exhibitive space is, one could say that it is a place in which a translation occurs, a confine in which the visitor may pass from one dimension to another, a line which separates reality from a limitless number of other worlds, or other perspectives of the world. This is a definition that a place like Camere can highlight through the simple and precious typology of its rooms. With their frescoes and decorated flooring, the views of a nineteenth-century Roman Villa, the exhibitions in this place are testimony to a perspective of that special equilibrium found within art. The works of art and the location make it possible to create a direct dialogue between the visitor and the artist. In the first room there is a figure lying in a chair with the semblance of a freshly sculpted clay model, a work by Mark Manders entitled “Clay Figure with Iron Chair”. The newspapers in the window accentuate the impression of being inside a phase of the creation of the sculpture. But appearances can be deceiving; in the work of the Dutch artist there is an evasion from any temporal dimension that could connote a historical reference to the piece. The sculpture hides its identity within a physicality that does not wish to show signs of time. Its existence is found in the mythology of an intimate, personal history that the artist attempts to bestow upon the piece. Olaf Nicolai uses a conceptual exercise in transforming elements of the everyday and of our present and past culture into an aesthetic and artistic idiom that allows permanent new ways of experiencing reality. In the works exhibited at the show one finds oneself facing an estrangement of the material. At first sight in fact one would seem to be looking at watercolours that the artist has painted with his very breath, yet they are photographic reproductions of these instead. A relationship with the original comes from the fact that in this case we find ourselves in front of an alteration of reality, taking the same image into two different formats. A projection shows different types of yellow while the audio track plays the recordings of a series of therapeutic sessions on the effects of Pentothal carried out in the Netherlands towards the end of the of the eighties. Rossella Biscotti recovers these experiments in order to be able to retrace the missing trails of memory linked to historical and social situations. In “Yellow Film” Biscotti retraces the relationship between collective memory and personal unconsciousness.
Lorenzo Benedetti
Novembre 2011
Roma
