Opening: Tuesday 27 October 2015 from 7 pm to 10 pm
Duration: until 2 December 2015
Exhibition space: Galleria Umberto Di Marino - Via Alabardieri 1, 80121, Napoli
Opening time: Monday - Saturday 3 pm / 8 pm – by appointment in the morning
The Galleria Umberto Di Marino is pleased to announce a special project by Ana Manso and André Romão entitled Sirena on Tuesday 27 October.
Restrained by the scales of a fish, the attraction of the mythological figure is expressed in a sensuality that is never brought to fulfillment but also the impetuosity of the human half that emerges from the abyss to entice sailors with a song that is both incomprehensible and sublime.
The siren represents an alluring and irresistible allegory which evokes a form of communication that goes beyond rational criteria in an exchange between two artists who share a stance rather than an actual design approach. Their investigation...delves down into the depths of what cannot be attained by knowledge but which can only emerge from the need to be surrounded by freely flowing thoughts and words.
On the brink of the precipice of reason, where language collapses, a silent conversation begins which feeds on the unconscious in a fatal attraction towards the void. Nonsense, automatic gesticulation and the triumph of the dérive nurture a creative force which has always been constitutionally and anthropologically considered to lie at the basis of mankind and social being.
Starting from a highly performance-based procedure that has accompanied the origins of all her work, Ana Manso leaves traces of her passing in wavy motion entangled with ropes and strings that can suddenly snap under the primeval force of the creative act. The body foreshadows itself in an absence, the artist becomes a bewitching siren that leads us through mazes of light and colour to explore mystery. The abysses of her mind open up, forming hybrid forms, dream-like figures from another world remote in time, akin to the primordial soup in which life formed.
Set against the statuesque volumes of naked bodies, the shells in the photos of André Romão also come from the abyss. Long considered enigmatic objects imbued with sensuality due to their sinuous spirals, shells have always formed part of collections of mirabilia (curiosities) and have gradually taken on transcendental iconographic meanings.
A completely bogus native American smokes in front of the video camera, delivering a nonsensical monologue. Everything starts with a press conference dominated by Gandalf Il Viola, representative of Indiani metropolitani (Metropolitan Indians, a left-wing protest movement in Italy during the 1970s) beside a young D'Alema (a leading Italian left-wing politician). The flow of words undergoes a process of beguiling hyper-sensualisation even though there seems to be no sense and he loses the thread, interrupted increasingly by the details of the Boxing ring sofa designed by Masanori Umeda for Memphis Milano (1984). The creative side of Movimento del '77, the movement that introduced freak culture to Italy, preached freedom from all restrictions imposed by the body or society: the emancipation stemmed from new processes of creativity of a social context in which the attack on the establishment began with the sabotage of traditional linguistic and cultural codes.
The siren therefore takes on a variety of different aesthetic, social and political forms but it always involves a force of renewal that follows the seductive appeal of abandonment and disorientation.
Ana Manso was born in 1984 in Lisbon. She lives and works in Lisbon.
Selected solo and group exhibitions
2015 Contemporary Divan, Museo Lucio Piccolo, Ficarra, Sicily, I
wet wet sunset ear on a wall, with Johana Pošová, curated by Markéta Stará Condeixa, Syntax, Lisbon, P
Through painting, Fondazione Rivoli Due, Milan, I
2014 Sereia, with André Romão, Museu Nogueira da Silva, Braga, P
The go between, curated by Eugenio Viola, Ernesto Esposito collection, Museo di Capodimonte, Napoli, I
Group show, Schwarz Contemporary, Berlin, D
2013 Z, Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon, P
Entre lo fugitivo y lo infinito, curated by Anja Schneider Isabel, Galeria Maisterravalbuena, Madrid, E
2012 Transition and duration, Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Napoli, I
Crystal Frontier: Ana Manso & Bruno Cidra, Enblanco Projektraum, Berlin, D
Oásis e o Deserto, Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon, P
Gothic (with Gonçalo Sena), Parkour, Lisbon, P
Sob Fogo/Under Fire, Galeria Baginski, Lisbon, P
2011 Universal, MARZ Galeria, Lisbon, P
André Romão was born in 1984 in Lisbon. He lives and works in Lisbon, P
Selected solo and group exhibitions
2015 Restless, 2015, Vera Cortês Gallery, Lisbon, P
Iron, Flesh, Abstraction, 2015, The Green Parrot, Barcelona, E
Beauty Codes, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon PT
Que Sais-Je, CAPC – Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux FR
2014 A nervous smile, Artist in residence #5, Macro Museum, Rome, I
Seriea (with Ana Manso), Museu Nogueira da Silva, Braga P
Europe, Europe, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Thomas Boutoux and Gunnar Kvaran, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo NO
Mercadoria Chinesa, Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisboa PT
2013 Golden masks hiding decomposing bodies, Galeria Baginski, Lisbon P
Bes Revelação, cur. by Filipa Ramos, Serralves Museum, Porto PT
2012 De Sokkel, Middleheim Museum, Anwerp B
A Praga dança / The Dancing Plague, Parkour, Lisbon, P
PhotoCairo 5, curated by Mia Jankowicz, Cairo EG
Where am I?, curated by Lorenzo Bruni, Binnenkant Foundation, Amsterdam, NL
2011 Barbarian poems, Galleria Umberto di Marino, Napoli, I
Bosh Young Talent Show, Stedelijk Museum, ‘S-Hertogenbosch, NL
2010 The Vertical Stage, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, D
The Winter of (our) Discontent, curated by João Mourão and Luís Silva, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, P
Entrada actualizada el el 19 oct de 2015
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