On Saturday June 1, from 12 a.m. to 10 p.m., the Gallery Doppelgaenger presents Dominium Melancholiae , an unprecedented action by Tony Fiorentino created for the Salenbauch Space of Venice.
As every year, during the Biennial of contemporary art, the Salenbauch Space hosts an artist’s work; this year it’s time for Tony Fiorentino, born in 1987, presenting the project Dominium melancholiae in collaboration with the Gallery Doppelgaenger of Bari. An installation of “mutant” sculptures by the young artist who, starting from the Academy of Carrara, continued his research between Athens and London.
The venetian exhibition is his first solo show in Italy.
Fiorentino explains himself his work: “Starting from the analyse of the artwork ‘Melacholia  I’ made by Albrecht Dürer in 1514, I discovered that the sea view with its small ships was probably the Venice lagoon. Saturn, and more specifically every comet linked to it, was considered responsible for the floods and high tides. It can be said that each comet appearing into a representation of Melanconia is to be one of these “saturnine comet”, it is clearly stated that these comets threaten the world with the Dominium melancholiae.
Even in cuneiform Babylonian texts was considered an established fact that a comet, turned toward the Earth, forewarned the high tide and the person who could predict such catastrophes was, particularly, the melancholic one. (from the book Saturn and Melancholy of Panofsky). The work Dominium melancholiae consists in a theca of glass in which the Saturn tree is built, that is an artificial vegetation obtained through the zinc immersion in distilled water and lead acetate. From zinc immersed in the solution chemistry, leaflets of lead come out covering it completely and creating a new changeable form that gives rise to a dark gray / black sculpture.This sculpture immersed into the liquid represents perfectly the melancholic humor, as the term “humor” comes from the Greek ygrós that is liquid, humid, wet. This artwork is susceptible to movement and its delicacy becomes an essential part of it

Spazio Salenbauch - Calle Larga XXII Marzo (San Marco) – Venice
June 1 – October 5, 2013 

Danh Vo, Fabulous Muscles, Museion, 2013, exhibition view. In primo piano/Vg/Front: We the people © Danh Vo, courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel. Foto Othmar Seehauser

In his work Danh Vo reflects on colonialism, migration and cultural identity, interlaced with personal memories of his childhood in Vietnam and the hardships his family faced during their escape to Europe.
He also challenges the established behavioural norms of civil society and the art world. The work he brings to Bolzano is a long-term project which involves creating a life-sized reproduction of the Statue of Liberty. The fourth floor of the museum will play host to elements in copper that correspond in size and weight to various components of the statue. The project sets out to explore the notion of freedom in the light of both personal and political considerations.

Museion – Via Dante 6, Bolzano
May 18 – September 01, 2013 

Danh Vo, Fabulous Muscles, Museion, 2013, exhibition view. In primo piano/Vg/Front: We the people © Danh Vo, courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel. Foto Othmar Seehauser

Danh Vo, Fabulous Muscles, Museion, 2013, exhibition view. In primo piano/Vg/Front: We the people © Danh Vo, courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel. Foto Othmar Seehauser

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The artists involved in the “Draftsmen’s fest ” on Milan, will come to Rome and will perform in a long evening of suond act and visual actions.
During the night will perform: Lorenzo Bernet, Canedicoda, Giorgio Di Salvo, Yannic Joray, Primitive Art, Lorenzo Senni, Dennis Tyfus.
The occupants, public, the former workers and the Swiss and Roman artists are invited to draw together and rethink, through music and design,the urban space, skills, art and crafts.

Draftsmen’s fest is a display in progress that relates the drawing – as a direct expression and gesture – and the sound production. During each of five event, curated by Francesco de Figueiredo and Massimiliano Bomba, are presented projects developed by artist and musicians – swiss and international – designed for the Swiss Institute in Milan.
Draftsmen’s fest examines the syncretic relationship between the drawed image and sound, with a special focus to the intimate and deep relation that is established when the spectator is involved in a frontal way: as a metaphor for the immediate impact that the binomial sound/image is able to activate.

Officine occupate ex RSI
Via Umberto Partini 21, Roma – June 7 h18 – 23

The Jury of the 55th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, chaired by Jessica Morgan (Great Britain) and composed of Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy (Mexico), Francesco Manacorda (Italy), Bisi Silva (Nigeria) and Ali Subotnick (United States), has decided to confer a Special Mention for National Participation to Japan, thanks to the project abstract speaking – sharing uncertainty and collective acts by Koki Tanaka, commissioned by The Japan Foundation and curated by Mika Kuraya.
NERO is proud to have contributed to the project by publishing the related book abstract speaking – sharing uncertainty and collective acts, which amply documents Tanaka’s award-winning work.
We would like to thank the artist, the Japan Foundation team and all the people who have contributed to the production of this publication.
For further details about the book, please click here.

Thomas Kratz, LICK GIN, installation view

In his first solo show in Italy, German artist Thomas Kratz presents “Lick Gin (Situations),” an exhibition consisting of seven new paintings and reliefs, three sculptural works, and a gallery intervention in the form of painted ceiling and walls. As with earlier work, the pieces in this exhibition press the viewer’s senses to work, encouraging open and fluid perception. But three sculptures, despite an apparent tension with the paintings, further Kratz’s exploration of the ability of surface to create refined coloration and texture. Kratz’s work has engaged with the exterior of painting, often by using soft colors painted on materials other than traditional canvas. Metal pigments, like manganese and tin, were used in his earlier “Lick Gin” series and were painted on wood; while his “Nude” series used fleshy colors on glass. The effect is the production of paintings that turn the viewer into a perceptual participant, engrossing their senses with a tangible feeling of absorption. In his new series of paintings, Kratz continues this trajectory, but pushes the interactive aspect of his work one step further with the sculptures and intervention. Three sculptures greet the viewer upon entering the gallery. One of two life-sized works, Games Master (Fountain) is a sort of figure atop a bucket, and might hint towards Duchamp—the sculpture looks like a rook from chess, an obsession of Duchamp’s—who might also be the game master—while the word “fountain” could easily reference Duchamp’s famous work of the same name. The three works form a blockade of sorts, a triangle that has to be dealt with before entering the main gallery. This triumvirate might also reference Kratz’s performative practice, where props and fabric hide the artist’s identity, and Kratz often uses a bicycle in an exhibition, riding it or using it as a work in its own right. Like his paintings, layering is involved in two of these sculptures: layering of fabric is used to bring out the qualities of the outer material, using their figure-like form to focus our attention on the surface. This continues in the new paintings and reliefs, where the use of fiberglass and other materials helps to highlight not only color’s relationship to the base substance, but also the outward power of the feel of form. Fiberglass has been placed on wood, epoxy has been placed on cardboard, and lacquer has been painted on aluminum, each becoming the manner through which color and form are delivered. The outcome of these forays into the nature of texture is work that brings the dimensionality of painting into the three-dimensional, and the dimensionality of sculpture towards painting. The perception of the artwork has been further enlivened by a painted ceiling—an acid green—and two walls—a pale blue, which mirrors the blue in AR°1. Situated so (in cella), the paintings become part of a nexus of membranes, part of a series of surfaces, which, taken together, function like a multicellular capsule. Each work lives and breathes in this tactile environment, but each is its own organism, exhibiting the subtle veneer of their body.

Aaron Bogart

May 4 -September 29, 2013
Galleria Collicaligreggi – via Oliveto Scammacca n2A, Catania

Thomas Kratz, LICK GIN, installation view

Thomas Kratz, LICK GIN, installation view

Thomas Kratz, LICK GIN, installation view

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Rizhome, Photo by Rachele Maistrello

* This is an ongoing and fluid blog-post, continually updated and edited. The post collates texts, notes, reprints, interviews, photographs, drawings and recordings produced by NERO.

Rhizome is a collateral project of critique focused on hidden and inner visions, inspired by Claudio Rocchetti’s The Promised Garden.
Curated by NERO with the involvement of a group of artists, observers and photographers, this online project will be a continous and dynamic gaze that will focus on events taking place in the garden.

Sylvano Bussoti, Rhizome

*Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.
(J.L. Borges, The Wall and the Books, 1950)

“The necessary tendency of all natural science is thus to move from nature to intelligence. This and nothing else is at the bottom of the urge to bring theory into the phenomena of nature. – The highest consummation of natural science would be the complete spiritualising of all natural laws into laws of intuition and thought. The phenomena (the matter) must wholly disappear, and only the laws (the form) remain. Hence it is, that the more lawfulness emerges in nature itself, the more the husk disappears, the phenomena themselves become more mental, and at length vanish entirely. The phenomena of optics are nothing but a geometry whose lines are drawn by light, and this light itself is already of doubtful materiality. In the phenomena of magnetism all material traces are already disappearing, and in those of gravitation, which even scientists have thought it possible to conceive of merely as an immediate spiritual influence, nothing remains but its law, whose largescale execution is the mechanism of the heavenly motions. – The completed theory of nature would be that whereby the whole of nature was resolved into an intelligence.”
(Friedrich Schelling, System of Trascendental Philosophy , 1800, introduction)

photo by Rachele Maistrello

photo by Rachele Maistrello

Canedicoda

Canedicoda

Canedicoda

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NERO FOR THE 55th BIENNALE:

The Volume of Air

The Volume of Air

NERO is happy to present a performance-based event that brings together a heterogeneous group of contemporary artists in the fascinating and unique setting of the ‘Serra dei Giardini’ in Venice.
Featuring Julieta Aranda, Delia Gonzalez, Daniel Gonzalez, David Lieske, Christoph Meier and Nicola Pecoraro, Moonspoon Saloon, Matteo Nasini and Davide Stucchi, Oliver Payne, Reto Pulfer.

THURSDAY, MAY 30TH – FROM 7 TILL 11.30 PM
SERRA DEI GIARDINI – VIALE GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI, CASTELLO

Elisabetta Benassi
THE DRY SALVAGES

Elisabetta Benassi, The Dry Salvages

NERO is presenting this book as part of the project The Dry Salvages by Elisabetta Benassi, produced for The Italian Pavilion at the the 55th International Art Exhibition – Venice Biennale. The book is published in a limited edition of 500 copies including a unique photo signed by the artist.

KOKI TANAKA
ABSTRACT SPEAKING SHARING UNCERTAINTY AND COLLECTIVE ARTS

Koki Tanaka, abstract speaking sharing uncertainty and collective acts

NERO is presenting the book abstract speaking sharing uncertainty and collective acts released on the occasion of the Koki Tanaka’s solo exhibition at the Japan Pavillion at the 55th International Art Exhibition – Venice Biennale.

The Unconnected
Internet Pavillon by Milton Manetas

internet-pavilion

NERO is mediapartner of The Unconnected. After having sailed together with ThePirateBay.com in 2009 and having conquered the island of S. Servolo in one evening of 2011, for its third edition Miltos Manetas’s Internet Pavilion is based in the old Oratory of San Ludovico, a holy church from the XVI Century.

May 29 – Sept 15 2013
Oratorio di San Ludovico, Dorsoduro 2552

THE BOOK AFFAIR

You can find the latest NERO publications as well the new issue of the magazine in the two days independent publishing fair held in the occasion of the 55th Venice Art Biennale and organized by Automatic Books publishing house and A plus A Slovenian Exhibition Centre.

 May 29 – 31 2013
Biblioteca di Castello – San Lorenzo, Castello 5065

GERVASUTI FOUNDATION

NERO is mediapartner of the intense program of exhibitions and projects promoted by the Gervasuti Foundation in occasion of the 55th Venice Art Biennale.

May – Sept 2013
Via Garibaldi, Fontamenta Sant’Aan, Castello 995

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The Volume of Air is a performance-based event that brings together a heterogeneous group of contemporary artists in the fascinating and unique setting of the ‘Serra dei Giardini’ in Venice. Kindly hosted by The Museum of Everything, for the first time in Venice, the programme of performances will punctuate the afternoon and evening of May 30th bringing together a vibrant mix of live music, dance and dj sets. The Volume of Air features a group of artists whose work shows a particular sensitivity towards sound or lies in the crossover between visual arts and other disciplines. The artists invited, most of whom are presented in Venice for the first time, have been encouraged to develop a personal contribution, free from a strict curatorial frame, in response to the festivity and fascinating setting of the event.

May 30th 2013
6.30 – 11.30 pm

featuring
Julieta Aranda
Delia Gonzalez
Daniel Gonzalez
David Lieske
Christoph Meier and Nicola Pecoraro
Moonspoon Saloon
Matteo Nasini and Davide Stucchi
Oliver Payne
Reto Pulfer
Serra dei Giardini, Viale Giuseppe Garibaldi
1254 Castello, Venice

The Volume of Air is organized in collaboration with MOUSSE and NERO.
The event is initiated by Francesca Astesani, Margherita Belaief and Ilaria Leoni.

The event is made possible by the generous support of
DELFINA DELETTREZ, ISTITUTO SVIZZERO DI ROMA, DEPART FOUNDATION, VOLTA FOOTWEAR, EX BAZZI

A special thanks to The Museum of Everything, Serra dei Giardini and Microclima.