Curated by Carson Chan
16 September – 23 October 2010
Opening:
16 September 2010, 18:30
Via Ventura 5
20134 Milan, Italy
www.federicoluger.com
U – Drawings, curated by the architect Carson Chan, is the new project created by Luca Pozzi for Federico Luger Gallery. For the most part, the project examines the potential of drawing, seen as a primitive practice that has survived throughout the succession of historical eras. A basic tool that has always been used to design, understand and visualize; in this case, it is approached as a device of experimentation, a tool with which to reveal aspects of space and time.
Starting with the scientific groundwork laid by the innovative Loop Quantum Gravity theory developed by the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, together with the intuitions of the French engineer Raymond Aschheim – which have emerged in the context of a personal conjecture known as the Crystalline Hyperdiamond – Luca Pozzi manages to construct a circular connective system composed of installations, sculptures and drawings (the latter obtained by applying bundles of high-frequency photons to a luminescent paint surface) capable of (visually) “arresting” their frenetic mediatic activity. The U – Drawings are the result of a process of visual “slowing” of light achieved by using a filter (luminescent paint) and of subsequent, definitive “blocking” in photographic documentation.
Luca Pozzi’s choice comes from the importance this ineffable element (light) has in the panorama of physical processes. Every behavior of known matter happens thanks to an intense dialogue among particles that swap energy packets (information composed of photons), ceding or absorbing other substantially different particles that are rare because they are without mass and without charge. Drawing with light, for the artist, means traveling at amazing speeds, connecting distant places, developing conjectures based on the experiments conducted at the Department of Physics of the University of Geneva by Professor Nicolas Gisin, who in 2003 teletransported a photon for a distance of two kilometers.
Viewed in these terms, everything is the product of the behavior of light, and basic reality seems to be composed of what the American physicist Roger Penrose defined as “spin networks”, in 1971, reversing the perspective on the ranking between the subject and the relational field.
In keeping with this logic, Luca Pozzi is able to view the formal substrate of connections as true creative architecture. The ‘form’ is the result of the meeting of ‘nuclei’ of scientific, artistic, religious, philosophical and literary or simply autobiographical origin, connected through a network of references that arises in relation to always new, multiple variables. For these reasons, the artist’s work relies on citations of works of the past, as in the photographic series Supersymmetric Partner (2007-2010) that documents his singular pilgrimage through the Banquets of Paolo Veronese, and where the polarity of three-dimensional man and two-dimensional painting is resolved through a physical gesture, a process of energy: a true leap.
Or as in Schrödinger’s cat through Piero della Francesca influence (2010), where the famous egg painted by Piero della Francesca in the Pala Montefeltro – now found in the Pinacoteca di Brera – is re-presented in a three-dimensional version, electromagnetically levitating over a tatami mat for the martial arts.
But the references are not only from paintings and the arts: in the more recent installation 9 Churches 9 Columns shown at the 3rd Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, for example, the citation is from a work of religious architecture, namely the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Virgin by the Moat, commonly known as St. Basil’s Cathedral, in Moscow. The exhibition projects should also be seen in a perspective of close dialogue. Each event is connected to what came before it, and formulated on the basis of theoretical contributions made by researchers and artists involved in the projects by means of interviews.
