MASSIMODECARLO could be very happy to current Ringing Saturn by Ariana Papademetropoulos, an exhibition curated by Arturo Galansino marking the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, at Casa Corbellini-Wassermann in Milan.
Ringing Saturn, the primary exhibition in Italy by California-based artist Ariana Papademetropoulos (b. 1990, Los Angeles), explores the thought of work as mediumship; as portals to worlds the place science, pseudo-science, physics, planetary, magnetic, astrological and psychic fields are channelled into landscapes of materialized creativeness.
The title of the exhibition riffs on Margot and Rudolf Wittkower’s “Born beneath Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists” (1963) a widely known dissertation on the embrace of eccentricity that got here to tell apart the expert artisan, who labored beneath the signal of light-fingered Mercury, from the artists recognized with the mysterious and brooding Saturn. Papademetropoulos performs with this distinction to create conventional work within the method of Outdated Masters that discover the otherworldliness that marks outer edges of our modern society’s fascination with the metaphysics and astrology.
Every portray affords its personal tackle the ‘umwelt’ or sensory bubble that each accommodates and limits our perceived realities. The origin story of every is rarely singular however born of dialogue between artist and medium, seen and invisible worlds. The style could be termed ‘psychic-specific’, conjured as it’s from the conversations between the artist and Wendy – a widely known non secular medium primarily based in Los Angeles who illuminates her visions of Papademetropoulos’s metaphysical realm.
Planets plunging into the abyss, large cleaning soap bubbles floating flippantly over sulphurous quarries, ghostly parlour animals, sensual feminine our bodies bewitched by spells, are the themes that characterize these canvases poised between hyperrealism and the surreal. The technical precision with which the painter renders these dreamlike worlds defies the excellence between the pure and the supernatural, creating tableaux that function portals to worlds of surprise. The work are pervaded by a luminous darkness by which evanescent, translucent heroines, captured in muffled interiors of silk and blue velvet, emerge from darkish backdrops, creating an impact of temporal and spatial suspension that captures the viewer in accordance with the idea of re-enchantment of the world, the conceptual core of the artist’s poetics.
In response to a actuality perceived as demystified by technological progress and broken by the ecological disaster, the painter thus proposes an ethos that reconnects us with thriller and the unknown. The affect of the occult and esotericism, rooted in California tradition for the reason that first half of the 20th century, permeates, albeit flippantly and sarcastically, the artist’s work. References to alchemy, mythology and psychoanalysis are woven into her canvases, making a wealthy symbolic cloth that invitations exploration and free interpretation.
The set up on the finish of the exhibition unveils the pun of the title and completes the exhibition expertise: three classic coin-operated telephones inserted into shell-shaped buildings and sourced from the Tropicana, a disused Las Vegas on line casino, enable guests to take heed to conversations between Ariana and her psychic Wendy, revealing, in a fashion each amusing and intimate, the iconographic supply of the themes depicted within the work. These whimsical objets trouvés are interactive components that amplify the theme of communication between completely different worlds, the layering and number of artistic processes, and embody the dualism between artifice and nature expensive to the artist.
Ringing Saturn is thus structured as an immersive expertise within the artist’s visible and conceptual universe, inviting us to discover worlds past the seen and to rediscover the magic hidden within the on a regular basis. Ariana Papademetropoulos, along with her distinctive capacity to fuse myths and symbols, eroticism and Jungian archetypes, guides us on a journey via liminal areas that problem our perceptions of actuality, inviting us to reconnect with our sense of surprise and reminding us of the transformative energy of the creativeness, an enchanted lens via which to rediscover the magic hidden within the very cloth of our existence. −Arturo Galansino