Ab urbe Genua duo lykanthropi Romae – Cesare Viel – Luca Vitone

Press release

Cesare Viel and Luca Vitone double solo show at pinksummer goes to Rome is about deforming and
recomposing, maybe also about messing up pages and rewriting, and moves from the artwork ineludible
principle of immanence. On this specific occasion, the transformation of form seems propelled by the desire
to explore further the diversity of the possibilities necessarily restricted by attitude and forms.
Somehow the exhibition recalls the art of recycling and the leftover cooking typical of Ligurian and Genoese
tradition. Contrary to what one might image, leftover cooking was not only common among poor social
classes, attempting to efficiently use their resources. As a matter of fact, the saying ” a good meal last three
days” ruled among aristocratic lineages too. In Genoa, like elsewhere, food was used to impress by
displaying opulence and power on the table. The more courses had the meal, the more leftover were left.
Therefore, in a land were wasting is traditionally inconceivable among any social class, cooks and
housewives found their way to get special dishes from leftover.
Cesar Viel and Luca Vitone, which paths run parallel since approximately thirties years, and by parallel we
mean, verbatim quoting Viel, ” deeply sharing same starting points that are living field of dynamics, some
sort of recognised family lexicon, like hearing sounds and existential linguistic signs inside a cave, in the
darkness and to recognize each other, through those emotional prelinguistic signs”, will present a fluid and
transforming exhibition by moving from pre-exhistent works.
For his exhibition in Rome, Cesar Viel goes back to the felts, drawn from some Matisse figures and
backgrounds, that he used as performance props for “Infinita Ricomposizione”, the most recent solo show of
the artist at pinksummer in Genoa, in which they saturated the space, the actual background of the
exhibition, through an intense dynamics almost conquered by Matisse ultra-color. However, even though the
work of Viel contains a tension towards the absolute, to the artist the absolute always assumes the features
of relativism, a relativism that before being cultural is ethical and turns itself in a distinguishing mark of all his
work, the refusal of any axiomatic and hierarchical determinism implicit in fixity, even just in the gender one.
In Rome felts assume an autonomous and independent rhythm and appear as previously ordered soft
mobiles fluctuating in the air, some “Apparati del Buon Umore” (Happiness Devices). Tactile works for a
“toucher actif” (active touching).
Luca Vitone will present two out of three “spatial page displacement”, like a sequential deployment of the
process that has determined the making of a book, that according to the original intention was meant to be
another thing but that circumstance made implode into a diary of Beckettian flavour. After all, the eventual
failure recorded in “Effemeride Prini” puiblished by Quodlibet does not appear so accidental if one considers
that the challenge of the artistist in residence at the American Academy of Rome in 2008 was “to photocopy
the voice” of Emilio Prini. A planet which position, we know, has always been remote and fleeting. However,
the way Vitone plays with the idea of failure is just what does make this book so special. Unlike Beckett’s
characters, Vitone does not spin his wheel like a hamster by conferring to the void, given that it exists, some
sort of frame, which in another time could have had the positive value of idleness that turns the chimerical
wait in a productive contemplation.
On top of every page, there is a date ripped off on a daily basis from three different newspapers, while in the
bottom, at the end of the day, there are the delicious dishes prepared by the cook of the American Academy,
accompanied by the appropriate combination with the wine served. The dialogs in the center of the page,
gradually transform Prini in the legendary creature of a creation myth.
Viel himself had already taken Henri Matisse, the other great absent in the exhibition, somewhere else, to his
personal primeval origin.
The exhibition is called “Cesar Viel and Luca Vitone. Ab Genoa city pair lykanthropi Romae”, just to recall
POP and horror subculture of those 80ies in which Cesare Viel and Luca Vitone, together, had their first
exhibition.