Luca Trevisani - Ai piedi del Pane

Luca Trevisani
Ai piedi del pane

Friday 13, Saturday 14, Sunday 15 May 2022
12 noon to 7 PM

commissioned, developed and curated by Xing
produced by Arte Fiera
with thanks to Fabio Quaranta

Hall 15 - Area A2

Ai piedi del pane. Luca Trevisani’s new performative activity conceived for Oplà. 2022 is dedicated to bread, and focuses on a new series of metamorphic sculptures. For Trevisani, bread is history’s most important technological object, one that many people consider poor and take for granted, but one that embodies incredible power. These are artworks to wear, shoes with soles of bread grafted onto existing uppers, bas reliefs to take for a walk around Arte Fiera, in an act of cultural archaeology that employs irony to challenge our hierarchy of material values. Shoes to put on and activate, a sort of artistic stress test in the halls.

If each sculpture is a distillate of reality, so does a fundamental food such as bread, or the shoe in its functionality, synthesise history, culture, time, and social relations. If hand-made products and gestures are a process of formalisation of the world, a shaping of energies, made through choices of taste, affinity and ideology, Trevisani appeals to invention and to turning things upside down. His wild shoe platform slips in camouflaged, mixing modern and traditional, material and social history, Tom Thumb and fetishism. His organic sculptures crystalise the act of walking while expanding its temporal dimension, experiencing the metamorphosis of bodies.

Ai piedi del pane is a new and consistent chapter in Luca Trevisani’s research: for over 15 years, he has studied the historical characteristics of sculpture in a dynamic laboratory that probes the uncertainties of the material world and our knowledge of things.

Luca Trevisani (b. Verona, 1979, living in Milan) is a multidisciplinary artist whose works have been exhibited in museums and institutions throughout the world, including MAXXI in Rome, Biennial of Sydney, Manifesta 7 Rovereto, Biennial of Architectur in Venice, MOT Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Kunsthalle in Vienna, Kunstverein in Braunschweig, ZKM in Karlsruhe, and Magasin in Grenoble. In addition to awards and shows in major art centres and museums, he has published several books, including: The effort took its tools (Argobooks, 2008), Luca Trevisani (Silvana Editoriale, 2009), The art of Folding for young and old (Cura Books, 2012), Water Ikebana (Humboldt Books, 2014), Grand Hotel et des Palmes (NERO Editions, 2015), and Via Roma 398. Palermo (Humboldt Books, 2018). He has written texts and essays on the works of artists such as Francesco Lo Savio, Luca Vitone, Giovanni Anceschi, Gianni Colombo, Liam Gillick, and Mark Manders. He teaches at IUAV in Venice and at the Free University of Bolzano. His research ranges between sculpture and video, and crosses borderline disciplines such as performing arts, graphics, design, experimental cinema and architecture, in a perpetual magnetic and mutant condition. In his works the historical characteristics of sculpture are questioned or even subverted, in an incessant investigation of matter and its narratives. Trevisani’s research is that of an explorer: a freethinker who studies the most diverse and eclectic forms of plastic language with curiosity – but also with detachment – acting on them from the inside although never aspiring to possess them definitively, instead seeking to reveal (and, if possible, to modify) their microphysics. Above all, conserving absolute passion for the practical and social utility of his work and for the great questions that it cultivates: perhaps the real significance of someone who conducts artistic research with authority.

www.lucatrevisani.eu

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Luca Trevisani - Ai piedi del Pane