99 WORDS ABOUT RYAN MCGINLEY

RYAN MCGINLEY, CRIMSON & CLOVER, 2015, C-PRINT, Courtesy the artist and Team Gallery

There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate – not a grain more. We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads – and then we can hardly see anything else. A man sees only what concerns him.

H.D. Thoreau – Autumnal Tints

99 WORDS WITH ERIK SAGLIA

ERIK SAGLIA, UNTITLED, 2015, SPRAY, PAPER TAPE, OIL PASTEL AND EPOXY RESIN ON PANEL

I get rid of boredom and monotony in a repeated gesture, going backwards, with the awareness that minimal wastes will return, imperceptibly slips, and unexpected variations, everything without willing it or realising it, in a mandatory and inevitable praxis. Till the end.

Erik Saglia

99 WORDS WITH STEFANO ARIENTI

STEFANO ARIENTI, PUZZLE DI PUZZLE, 2015, PUZZLE ON POSTER

On the occasion of The Blank Benefit 2015, the annual event to support The Blank network activities, Stefano Arienti has created Puzzle di Puzzle.
This work is composed by 48 unique pieces and is recomposable as a puzzle in a unique great image, that will be recreated for the first time in its entirety on 11 December 2015 in the frame of the Spazio ALT.

99 WORDS WITH CUOGHI CORSELLO

CUOGHI CORSELLO, IL TARDIS (DETAIL), 2014, SCULPTURE OF GLASSES AND ROW OF LITTLE STARS, 2014

The Tardis

Tardis is referred to the Police’s telephone booth that navigates through space and time in the longest-running English science-fiction series: Doctor Who.

Into the big factories we occupied, usually when
I was tidying up and cleaning, I used to compose objects; sometimes, while stopping and grasping,
I photographed scenes suggested by motionless actors.

As now I live and work in a former printing press, which is also a warehouse for things gathered during all my working life, space is limited and forces me to compose very sparingly, denying the accumulation of new stuff.

However now and then I can’t hold out against something I meet.

The Tardis consists in an orange glass of the Italian public telephone booths, with a Pinocchio shape above that comes from the crushed mirror of a garden table tipped over by the wind.

Little stars on a semi-rigid thread go from underneath his long nose up to the sky. It seems like Pinocchio is looking at the row of stars in the sky, in the space, from his horizontal
two-dimensionality.

Tardis says it’s not late yet to reach people’s desires. Pinocchio is our oldest Doctor Who, naïve, curious, clever and brave explorer, who has a flair for business, poet and dreamer, just like Italians.
In his orange booth he travels through the stars, imagining times and spaces;
and the Universe is made of imagination since its primordial composition,
so that we will get into the one
of all the worlds.

Cuoghi Corsello

99 WORDS WITH STUDIO TEMP

[The Blank: litterary an empty space to be filled. A container of possible solutions which have been given a -open- shape. Place of power where experiences concerning the art world occur. Available space of contemporary solutions, in which contemporary is an expression of the flowing time, always]

Studio Temp

99 WORDS WITH CHRISTIAN FOGAROLLI

CHRISTIAN FOGAROLLI, REMEMBER, REPEAT, REWORK, (DETAIL), 2015, INSTALLATION VIEW AT DE APPEL ARTS CENTRE, AMSTERDAM

P853669
Do you know this young woman?
She is under a spell of amnesia.
She believes to be about 23 years old and speaks with a southern accent, this young woman has been found wandering in Los Angeles streets.
When a policeman approached her on the 41st, and she asked him to help her learn who she was, under hypnosis she said she was an orphan and save a girl from drowning.
In a prayer book found on her possession, a name listed as Caroline Lovett; was signed…
The authorities have asked for photographs…

Christian Fogarolli

99 WORDS WITH JACOPO MILIANI

JACOPO MILIANI, ROPES AND PALMS (DETAIL), 2015, DIRECT UV PRINT ON ALUMINIUM
Courtesy Studio Dabbeni, Lugano

A rope is a shapeless object.
The rope shape can be subject to tensile forces imposed by an action and the gravity.
The human body is subject to the same type of forces.
The present is always out of focus, it changes continuously, but it is a force which we must constantly relate with.
Movement, time, rhythm and metamorphosis.

Jacopo Miliani

99 WORDS WITH DIEGO MARCON

DIEGO MARCON, TRIPTYCH. THE NAP, 2014, VINILE ADESIVO MONOMETRICO PRESPAZIATO NERO, DIMENSIONI VARIABILI. VEDUTA DELL’INSTALLAZIONE, VENTURA XV, MILANO.
Courtesy l’artista. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

(A male voice)
All the cities have been bombed, all the buildings burnt.
Every single wall has been razed to the ground, those of façades and porches, arcades and halls.

Hospitals have been destroyed, along with schools and churches
(slowly) malls, stadiums, cinemas, museums.
Every park and square has been destroyed too, playgrounds set on fire. The seesaws and the benches are nothing but ash – the statues have been dismembered and each piece reduced to smithereens.
Nothing remains of the bars and their summer chairs, of the grocers or any other shops: no more steamed up café windows along the winter streets, no more cups for those coffee machines.

All the houses have been bombed, collapsing into clouds of dust, from the roof right down to the garage.
Each room torn apart (a voice of a little girl, singing faintly) one after the other: (back to the male voice, slowly) living rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms.
Nothing more than the ashes of desks and drawers, of sofas and carpets, ovens and knives, towels and sheets.
All at the mercy of a gust of wind – nothing else.

All the fathers are dead, together with hundreds of the mothers – the last are dying somewhere faraway – (a voice of a little girl, singing faintly again) we can’t see, we can’t see. (Back to the male voice) a lot of young people have died too, along with their brothers and sisters.

But I couldn’t care less about all this because none of it has ever been mine.

Diego Marcon, “Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation (A Script for an Introduction)”, in Diego Marcon, A script for Dick, Cura.books, Roma, 2014, p.15

99 PAROLE CON ALICE GUARESCHI

ALICE GUARESCHI, SENZA TITOLO (VIRGOLETTE), 2014, ARGILLA, CM 13 X 7

– I think that, basically, it probably comes out of the same concerns: isolated incidents
in space and time, for one.
– Isolated incidents? What do you mean exactly?

(Frammento di conversazione tra Robert Barry e René Denizot, Parigi 1980)

THE BLANK BERGAMO CONTEMPORARY ART | 99 WORDS WITH ALICE RONCHI
ALICE RONCHI, ALICE, 2012, UMBRELLAS AND STEEL TUBES, DIMENSIONS VARIABLE

Daniele Perra: How to match the vitality, the convertibility and mobility of nature with the immobility of sculpture?

Alice Ronchi: The sculpture can be very dynamic if you think about it in terms of vision. Sculpture is the moment that comes before, and especially, is what happens later; it is the next time you will see an upside down umbrella under the wind and you’ll see a mushroom, or a flower or whatever it evokes you.
This is the sculpture in my work, a materialized vision that starts to be a vision again.
To me it represents one of the possibilities that has been given to an object or to a material to transform itself.

* The text was written by Alice Ronchi in occasion of an interview conducted by Daniele Perra for Artribune. This question and answer has never been published.