Gianluca Capozzi: The Passenger (eng text)

    БУЛАРТ ГАЛЕРИЯ | BULART GALLERY 

представя | presents

ДЖАНЛУКА КАПОЦИ (ИТАЛИЯ) | GIANLUCA CAPOZZI (ITALY)

"THE PASSENGER"

работи върху хартия | works on paper

куратор | curator 

Раул Замудио Тейлър (САЩ) | Raul Zamudio Taylor(USA)

2 -16 | 04 | 2013

откриване | opening  02 |04| 2013  18:00  

варна.шипка 22 | varna. 22 shipka st

about the exhibition:

 "The Passenger is a solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper by the Italian artist Gianluca Capozzi. The exhibition’s title is culled from the similarly titled film by Michelangelo Antonioni;  and the curatorial framework that ties Capozzi’s works with the film is manifold and not as disparate as it may seem: the film’s protagonist, which is played with aplomb by Jack Nicholson, is an American journalist who exchanges his identity with a deceased man he finds in a North African hotel room. The transnational undercurrent of the film manifests in the exhibition in a roundabout way: the works were made in the artist’s studio in Italy and shown abroad. It is not so much that the artworks take on a new identity with each itinerary, but a work can acquire other meanings altogether by its reception in myriad cultural contexts thus engendering narratives that were not originally intended. 

Although Capozzi’s works for the current exhibition were inspired from diverse sources, experiences, and musings, their polysemy multiplies as analogues to Antonioni’s protagonist. Further highlighting this are works that range from the figurative to the purely abstract; even the latter pieces are not devoid of the referential in feigning non-representational forms found in nature as well as in culture. Some works appear like frenetic topographies or the automatism of someone under trance. Even Capozzi’s figurative works trigger the imagination not only in spite of their formal exuberance, but because their titles are oblique and rife with anthropomorphic ambiguity which results in a corpus of icons, archetypes, surrogates, doppelgangers, and so forth. 

In one work titled Woman (2013), for instance, the frontal quality of the figure’s pose belies the allusion to portraiture. Yet because the title only refers to gender, it is potentially the representation of all women, or no women, or maybe it is the ideation of womanhood operating archetypally. In allowing the work a degree of narrative opacity, Capozzi’s figure becomes both like Nicholson who takes on the identity of the deceased as well as the deceased himself; for the identity of Woman remains free-floating as it negates singularity in not being any woman in particular. Other works in the exhibition also underscore the conceptual strategy of ambiguity to various degrees. 

With rather demure and literal titles including Man, Man at the Sea, Three Men (all 2013), Capozzi presents an iconography of images where the figures become exceedingly reduced to an almost absent presence.  Outlines of humanoid forms become shadows and shells of their former selves. Capozzi’s “portrait” gallery or phantasmagoric salon leaves the viewer with a self that is concomitantly other; it is a dialectical ontology of 

being/ nonbeing. 

But this self is, however, an existential one; for it is symbolically the deceased man in the North African hotel room, just as Gianluca Capozzi is metaphorically Antonioni’s protagonist.  But whereas Nicholson’s journalist documents the ubiquitous and the mundane, Capozzi’s artistic reportage is of a philosophical bent that reminds us that were all passengers too, in one degree or another, on our own journey filled with self-empowerment, self-doubt and occasionally feeling as if living a life of mistaken identity.  

Raul Zamudio - New York City

Raúl Zamudio Taylor is a New–York based independent curator and critic. He was Art Director, Other Gallery, Shanghai; and Director of Exhibitions, White Box, NY. He has curated over 60 exhibitions in the Americas, Asia and Europe. Recent exhibitions include co-curator, 2009 Beijing 798 Biennale, co-curator, 2008 Seoul Media Art Biennale, and artistic director, 2008 Yeosu International Contemporary Art Festival. As a critic, he has authored over 200 texts published in books, encyclopedias, museum and gallery exhibition catalogs, magazines and journals.

*images: Jack Nicholson in The Passenger, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975 ; works by Gianluca Capozzi - Woman, The men at the sea, At the sea;

the author for his project:

For the gallery Bulart I thought one installation of drawings on paper, very light, combined with some paintings on a canvas very double.
A dualism that divides attention between the volume and its absence.The paintings and drawings Represent the faces That turn in masks, keeping Their expressiveness.
An aesthetic observation That addresses the issue of empathy in social communication, verbal and visual.
A look at the primordial world, complete in an instant of time, discovering, communicating the beginning of a vision That happens and it Becomes an exchange at a specific time.The technique used is acrylic on linen canvas and drawings, acrylic, oil and pastel colors.The drawings are attached to the wall so as to preserve their volatility, as a leaf.The canvas have a thickness of 4 cm and are attached to the wall, like a stone.The difference between matter and anti-matter makes manifest a duality.
Dualities are part of life and represent the energy with which the man makes his life experience to bring to the infinite consciousness.This is the path of man, is a chance to become aware, of coming to know.

Gianluca Capozzi (1973) was born in Avellino, Italy where his lives and works. He finished Florence Academy of Fine Arts (1996),Faculty of Fine Arts, Granada, Spain (1997). He presented his solo projects (Palazzo Ducale, Genoa, Velan center, Turin, Mac, Caserta, Museo Laboratorio, Pescara, Artra gallery, Milan, Morotti gallery, Varese, Paolo Erbetta, Berlin,  and others) Participated in several curatorial projects, biennials for contemporary arts, collective exhibitions and competitions in Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Austria, Costa Rica as most important of them are : ArtWiki project, 7th Berlin Biennale; Under the Volcano, Andromeda Contemporaneo, Costa Rica ; Spam, Pastificio Cerere Fundation, Rome; Apokalips, Pirelli Palace, Milan, La retina lucente, Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea, Termoli; (2012); Research Power Glory (2009), MUSA, Museum auf Abruf, Wien, ; Versus XIV (2008), Velan center, Turin;  Biennial of Tehran (2008); New painters of the reality (2007), Padiglione arte contemporanea, Milan and others;  For his art wrote the art critics Raul Zamudio Taylor, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Francesca Referza, Mark Westall, Raffaele Gavarro, Blanca De La Torre, Massimo Sgroi, Gabriele Perretta, Antonello Tolve, Lorenzo Canova, Alberto Mugnaini, Joakim Borda, etc.