Curated by Francesca Pasini
Palazzetto Tito, Dorsoduro 2826, 30123 Venice
The exhibition by Stefano Arienti Custodie Vuote, curated by Francesca Pasini, will be held in the rooms of Palazzetto Tito from Friday 27th July until Sunday 30th September 2012. The exhibition complements the artist's collaboration with the Fenix show, designed for the Fenice Opera House, and staged together with the Swiss choreographer Foofwa d'Imobilité. For this project Arienti started out from the notion of the Pleasure of Knowledge. While at the Fenice Opera House this theme is expressed through an opening towards the audience, in the exhibition at Palazzetto Tito the artist favours the more intimate and everyday aspect of knowledge. The books to be found in two rooms of Palazzetto Tito may be picked up and browsed through. Elsewhere we come across original Persian carpets dyed red by the artist and covering the entire floor; a large table with ceramics (produced together with his own students from the IUAV University), and sofas: all elements which allude to a private and everyday dimension of knowledge, but also to that which took place in the chambers of the ancient Venetian palazzos. In the central room, the album covers of CDs of music from all around the world, alternating with some of their empty cases, create a vision of world geography, of which the borders are determined by a series of sounds. This is a material which originates from an ongoing research project carried out by Stefano Arienti into an endless collection of musical extracts. Custodie Vuote ('Empty Cases') is the title of this installation, which is also the basis for the work shown during Fenix, projected onto the safety curtain of the Fenice Opera House, where for more than an hour - without repeating - we see digital scans of the CD covers on show in Palazzetto Tito. Both the projection and the installation are soundless, and in the central room of Palazzetto Tito, the discs have deliberately been removed from their cases. This intention denotes the progressive dematerialisation of the recorded music business, which all tends to end up on the net. The books manipulated with the addition of holes establish a relationship with the Libro Fenice present in the Theatre, in which pages with drawings by the artist are interspersed with blank pages where visitors are invited to write their own thoughts. A new major cycle of works will be displayed in two adjacent rooms: more than 30 large-format pieces of paper, painted directly by the artist, completely cover the walls of the room, creating "a suspended tapestry" of various colours, with a great dominance of red as well as darker, burnt shades. This is an unprecedented element in Arienti's work, approaching painting as a sequence of light and colour, leading us back to his countless photographic sequences. A link with the Fenice Opera House also returns through Préparépétitions: preparatory videos for the Fenix choreography by Foofwa d'Imobilité, screened in one of the rooms in Palazzetto Tito. Other elements highlight Arienti's eye for the multidisciplinary: in particular the fabrics, designed for the Miroglio Textile Company, and used for the Fenix dancers' costumes, as well as a number of cushions on display in Palazzetto Tito. The intimate and colloquial aspect of knowledge and the creative opening towards other disciplines thus returns here. As Arienti states, "instead of talking about an intimidating form of culture, I'm thinking here of elements which lead to knowledge as a source of forms and pleasure."