OVER is an anthological exhibition that constitutes something of a platform, where artists who use
different languages coexist in a general artistic and aesthetic panorama in a constant state of flux. Quite
apart from those cells that are still vigorously distinguished by the paradigms of the Avant-garde, whose
nucleus anticipated the figure of an militant artist involved socially and politically in its evolutionary
developments, for the generation of artists who were born in the sixties and seventies, the concept of
irreversibility and of stylistic consistency has become drastically absent these days.
Some of these artists feature in OVER, on the one hand to underscore – this is the curator’s intention –
the blurred sense of historical belonging that is now somewhat dated, while on the other to convey an
understanding of the extent to which the identity of the transition, transmedia and unisexuality of
languages has driven artists and historians to devote attention to a re-examination of history, in its
progressive, evolutionary significance, erecting a major question mark against the assumptions of the
latter half of the last century and elaborating (and sometimes theorising) Post-Modernity. While some
deplore that the trail was already blazed for a return to traditional academic forms towards the end of
the sixties in the direction of painting, drawing and the plastic arts, on the other hand this phenomenon
– which coincides with a social fallout set free of ideologies, but not always completely free of nostalgic
revivals or forms of inurement to the image dictated by the “age of reproducibility” – encourages us to
look at the globality of a society in a state of change and growth and to ponder a phenomenon that has
obvious parallels in other areas of socio-political geography in the environs of art.
It is vitally important now to look back and reconsider times in history of no great remoteness, when the
relationship between art and the market was in its heyday and such concepts as fashion, the market and
strategies of cultural policy seemed to be the driving force – and not only in artistic terms – of the art
world. The market in particular used to dictate the rules, transforming the museum from a place of
intellectual intercourse into a customer base for a critical mass paying for those forms of exhibitions that
are often devoid of representation, but in which the blockbuster concept and the system of approved
curators have replaced – in the majority of such cases – the classical, traditional universe of thinking and
of authenticity.
In the midst of unrelenting criticism of these often deleterious forms and methods of policy, some more
or less parallel morphologies of artistic creations are coming into being as a sort of counterbalance,
opening up new ways and additional spaces of discussion, to the point that serious questions are being
raised about the identity and utility of the museum as a place for preserving history and its memory.

The artists shown in this exhibition are young: of all of them it can be said that they are to some extent
lifted from their own creative processes and placed in the new context of a curatorial experience whose
matrix is simply anthological. The passage is one from a conceptual-theosophist experience, that only a
handful of curators was capable of applying to the specifics of a given period in history, to the simply
visual, sensorial and analytical experience related the image and its representation.

Mario Casanova, 2015 [translation Pete Kercher]

 

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