Ursula Sprecher & Andi Cortellini, Juliane Eirich, Johanna Eliisa Laitanen - A voyage between the sublime and the reality
Opening: February 20, 2014 from 19:00
Anteprima d'arte Contemporanea - Rome
by Camilla Boemio
The exhibition is a journey through pictures, evasion and memory, at the boundary between the sublime and the daily routine. Made from an organic bodywork. The unreleased photographs by Swiss: Ursula Sprecher & Andi Cortellini, the series by Juliane Eirich and video by Johanna Eliisa Laitanen. This last Aura of Place d 'Armes is the story of an attempt to preserve a past which perhaps never existed. Laitanen describes memories put together from fragments, a repetitive story in the same context in which it took place. Surely emerges the architecture originality, the place’s rituals and the methodical reconstructions. It focuses on the examination of strong moments as well as intermediate states: in the early morning, the emptiness of the place, the exercises. By combining persistence with sudden references and a story, that takes place in different temporal levels, generating an unreal atmosphere work. The work was shot in 2009 inside Louis XIV’s stables in Versailles, the entrusted part of the “Académie du Spectacle Equestre”, an institution that promotes and preserves the equestrian art. The immaculate vision of the place and its regulating norms serve as a protest against the values still in force. The Academy is enclosed in its own little world similar to that in a glass bottle, an idealistic attempt to create and preserve something profoundly beautiful but artificial. In this work, illusion is shattered by the threat, always lurking for imperfection. Itoshima by Eirich explores the conflicting emotions during the residency in a beautiful old house in the countryside of south subtropical Japan.
By bike, she has explored, the region of Itoshima collecting new impressions: by day and by night, in the countryside and in the cities, in the stifling heat during heavy rain and storm.
She narrates the discovery of a place between dreams and introspection. Her images have an iconographic quality with no time or history. What is trivial, changes, because of the wise use of light, color, and because it is funneled into a new perspective in which places created by mankind interact with the surrounding nature. This, rearranging the lines and bringing the viewer into an emotional contemplation of the place depicted.
In the series HobbyBuddies Sprecher & Cortellini group portraits become improbable sets in which people are united by the same passions, jobs or interests. Nothing is left to chance. The images betray the research and the careful organization: the number of subjects and their clothing, props, accessories. The approach used conveys in unusual, intriguing compositions.
All attributable to a membership tribe in which the loss of individuality favors harmony and unification with other equals in the slightest detail. We are all in our most widespread realism attributed to a sample, in which the everyday emerges, presenting a version that can be sometimes surprising and amusing.