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Lazarus Effect
Curated by Luca Beatrice, Lauri Firstenberg,
and Helena Kontova |
The panorama of today’s painting has been by far the most
magmatic, contradictory, and evolutionary for many years until now,
above all because painting has freed itself from that inferiority
complex, that could be justified only if it were hidden or confused
with something else, but also because it learned to declare its restless
and constantly mutating nature.
For a long time non-iconic painting was considered completely inadequate
to represent the contingent reality experienced through the images
and their seductive power: in the year 2000 this language found strength
both by recovering the more synthetic versions, linked to the sign
abstractionism of a rational-suprematist matrix and the gestural happening
of the old Art Informel, identified as academic and surpassed retro
painting par excellence. Yet neither the remake of classic abstraction
nor the new action painting can be interpreted with the regard we
have been used to in past decades; there is a different critical awareness
involved, a new shift that makes its filtering precisely through the
images indispensable (at times implicit, at times declared) or relating
to architectural and project structures that constitute the most evident
meeting point with reality.
And finally the important recovery of hyperrealism should be considered
the shortest of the avant-garde undercurrents branded in the ’70s
as the ultimate resistance of painting before its temporary eclipse.
Then the points of reference to represent reality were different ones
(photography, the cinema) and therefore the only way to justify the
uselessness of such an unused gesture consisted in ‘remaking’
reality more real than real, which is therefore evidently false. Nowadays,
after having gone from the remake to the cover, the passage between
what is and what is represented has been left out: therefore returning
to paint in a captious, meticulous and maniacal way, when whatever
artificial instrument is in the position to restore a better result,
means highlighting the power of useless fascination implicit only
to painting.
Artists:
Kamrooz Aram
Mark Bradford
Delia Brown
Jane Callister
Brian Calvin
José León Cerillo
Andrea Chiesi
Jay Davis
Kaye Donachie
Benjamin Edwards
Judith Eisler
Isca Greenfield Sanders
Terry Haggerty
Eberhart Havekost
Merlin James
Johannes Kahrs
Jukka Korkeila
Robert Lucander
Julie Mehretu
Ryan Mendoza
Manu Muniategui
Graham Parks
Tal R
Peter Rostovski
Christoph Ruckhäberle
Matt Saunders
James Sheehan
Dana Schutz
Dita Stepanova
Rezi Van Lankveld
Adriana Varejâo
Matthias Weischer
Janet Werner
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