Casey Kaplan
Diego Perrone “WARGAMES” at Villa Croce Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Genoa
A project by Amixi Villa Croce Museo d’Arte Contemporanea – Genova conceived and directed by Vittorio Dapelo.
Curated by Francesco Garutti.
Amixi Villa Croce Contemporary Art Museum Genoa are pleased to present WARGAMES, a site-specific piece by Diego Perrone realized in occasion of the first edition of DAVANTI AL MARE project.
Conceived and directed by Vittorio Dapelo, produced by the Villa Croce Amixi – Contemporary Art Museum – Genoa, “Davanti al mre – ATTO I” is an experimental and open format project. Thought as an expanded residency, as a research work on the Genoa environment – metaphorical and physical production space – “Davanti al mare” is presented now to the public as a zone where an artist – in collaboration with a curator and publisher selected – will work together to the construction of a site-specific piece and an artist book using as inspiring materials the museum and its atmospheres, the architecture of the city of Genoa and its landscape.
After the first phase of the project – a lecture series by the artist at the Villa Croce Museum – for DAVANTI AL MARE Atto I curated by Francesco Garutti, Diego Perrone presents WARGAMES, a new sculpture conceived in dialogue with a precise space of the city of Genoa and a volume published by Humboldt Book integrating the work.
Decided to explore the sea territory and the naval model making as physical and metaphorical landscape – the construction of a ship model as a never ending alternation between the real dimensions and the infinitely small, as a mental, autistic process obsessively procedural – Diego Perrone research has crossed laboratories of Naval Engineering at the University of Genoa, the archives and the workshop of ligurian model makers, till arriving to take the shape of a precise encounter, a body-to-body dialogue in the Sala del Naufragio at Villa del Principe – Palazzo Andrea Doria.
In direct relation with the weave and the warp of the sea and military scenes of the Battaglia di Lepanto tapestries on display in the Sala del Naufragio, Perrone’s piece both opaque and transparent, liquid and sculptural, observes and lets itself be crossed by the crowd of images embroidered onto the Lepanto series. Fragments of boats and oars, allegorical animals and coastal landscapes are reflected ambiguously on Perrone’s last born sculpture among the glass casting pieces produced for the first time at Museion in Bozen and at Massimo De Carlo London in 2015.
From the ear and the cranium of the bas-relief in glass by Diego Perrone, two little hands emerge clasping the model of a navy ship. Between the cerebellum and the ear, just by that part of the skull which in anatomy is defined as the ‘temporal fossa’, things and liquid dreams melt: a military ship as an involuntary and accidental memory, a miniaturized model maker mirage among the hulls and the embroidered weapons of the Lepanto tapestries.
WARGAMES takes its start from the desire of setting an encounter up between the concave and convex, dense and extended idea of space featured in Perrone’s work and a precise locus of the city of Genoa, a place able to boost and expand the shape and the thought of it. WARGAMES takes form with the intention of building up a space where “miniature and mania, dream and violence” get close and touch each other.
Through the dialogue and the active collaboration of two institution of the city as Villa Croce Contemporary Art Museum and Villa del Principe Genova, DAVANTI AL MARE Atto I is presented to the public as project conceived to investigate the city and its landscape, trough art. Genoa as the theater, the sea as the scenery.
at Villa Croce Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Genoa
until 23 June 2017