[CAROUSEL]

Gagliardi Art System Gallery

Solo exhibition curated by Angela Madesani | Turin - Italy

22.05.2013 – 29.06.2013

A man standing on a rock, with his back to the mountains, is reading a book. Described in this way, this pose could look unnatural, but the balance that is reached is not so unstable. This man becomes the leading character in most of J & Peg’s works on display. His figure appears in different situations, as a sort of existential modulor.

This exhibition holds a special place in the history of the young Milanese duo. It is a way to take stock of what they have done up to now - as if they wanted to examine their (artistic) lives at this moment in time. The purpose behind all their works is to confront the self. So this exhibition could be described as intimate – without the limiting, negative connotations that are often associated with this adjective. Intimacy here is the desire to dig into the self, in order to attain the meaning of existence through an analysis of particular aspects. So the man is reading, but what? We can’t know, but maybe what he is reading isn’t so important after all - maybe it’s the book of life, of experience, of encounter, a book of connections between different situations.

Here, too, as in all the works they have created in recent years, the protagonists of the works are all covered by a veil, which blurs their esthetic features. The focus is on being a human being in the fullest sense of the word. The characters are like statues. It is as if the dust of time had settled down, forming a sort of patina. In Indian philosophy the veil of Maya, also mentioned by Schopenhauer, is what permeates the noumena and turns them into phenomena, in the vanity of appearance.

The man is standing among the sharp outlines of the mountains, which soar silently, snow-clad and crystalline in their eternity. The circumstances of life pass us by. Humans walk, travel, and travelling is knowledge, growth. What is particularly interesting in this new series of works, all created especially for the exhibition, is the relationship that is established between different cognitive levels, as both the leading character and the other figures are the result of the artists’ performative actions. There is no deliberate personalization, only hints, suggestions, possible links - which the spectator is left free to read, to interpret -, and the photograph printed on transparent material, detaching from the underlying drawing. Drawings as icons, photography as an index or trace of reality. Photography registers a performance that mimics reality. As if we were looking at a figure of speech, a chiasm in which moments flow into each other.

In these works time is suspended, and there are no obvious references. People meet and connections are created. What we can see in the exhibition is a series of large-size works played on shades of white, in which the artists again use Plexiglas and drawing. And again we see a standing man, apparently a priest - of which cult is ultimately irrelevant. Behind him, a drawing of an architectural detail[1]. The scene has an air of sacredness about it. The work is built by light. Photography is writing with light, in a philological sense. In an image like this, light is spirituality, as in ancient architecture. This is what Abbot Suger says (quoted by Panofsky) about the beauty of light, at the dawn of the Gothic style.