May 9–25, 2012
Opening: Tuesday, May 8, 2012, 19
Via Paullo 12/A
Milan, Italy
Hours: 10–13, 14–18 Monday–Friday
Saturday and Sunday by appointment
“In the fog, the sun becomes white, it looks like a hole in the gray sky.”
–Bruno Munari
After the solo shows Ogni cosa a suo tempo, 2011, at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, and Walden Method, 2010, at MAR – Museo d’Arte della città in Ravenna, Ettore Favini is present in Milan, at Marsèlleria, with a new series of works.
An artist manipulator of ideas and objects, thoughts and spaces, Ettore Favini builds his work within an intimate relationship with history and its relevance. A reader and interpreter of the social context observed in its complexity also through public art actions, he creates works and installations of great poetic and symbolic value. His interventions are organic, in the sense that they do not remain unchangeable, but rather, transform over time and in the space in which they react.
Without any mechanical modification, Favini interrogates time, memory, and the landscape.
The relationship between time, public space, and nature are in fact among the recurrent themes in his artistic practice, and obsession for time is a constant.
At the source of his new series of works, on display at Marsèlleria: giving exposure to an invisible phenomenon, attempting to give shape to time, to narrate it, through a process that has lasted a year.
A year dedicated to observing the guiding star: the Sun.
Observing the solar analemma (the technical term of the Sun’s movement across the sky) restores a shape that is similar to an 8, the lemniscate of mathematics, the symbol of infinity.
For some years now, the artist has been using processes that lead to extended incubation, in order to better “digest” the process of making: for this series, Favini aimed some cameras on the Sun with a special sun filter and took a picture at the same time (12:15) established by a calendar, always with the same frame, with the risk that all this waiting could be in vain due to a ray of light that could filter in and burn the frames.
The result is an 8 suspended in a black sky, the form of infinity in the void, a shape that has continued for years now and will continue, marking our time with the calendar.
Opening the show SunRa is a work on canvas and an action dedicated to Io che prendo il sole a Torino il 19 gennaio 1969, by Alighiero Boetti. Visitors them enter a flow of forms and images, a process where the display elements have been directly transformed by the sun or refer to processes tied to the natural element. An investigation aimed at the multiple aspects this may assume, also in relation to history. This multiplicity is also present on a linguistic level: sculpture, collage, installation are all media used by the artist in constant dialogue with each other.
Ettore Favini (Cremona 1974) has reached his fifth solo show in Milan. In 2012 he will participate in Manifesta (Hidden Place and Identity, curated by Michela Sacchetto) and at Futura Project, in Prague. He has won numerous awards, including: in 2006 the Premio Artegiovane “Torino e Milano incontrano l’Arte”; in 2007 he won the prestigious Premio New York at Columbia University in New York; in 2009 he was a finalist for the Premio per gli Amici del Castello di Rivoli. In 2012 he will be an artist-in-residence at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, New York/Umbertide (Perugia-Italy).
Press release and images in high-resolution available here.
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Federica Cimatti: +39 02 67077082 / +39 333 4346146 / f.cimatti [at] altofragile.it
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