PINKSUMMER IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE NEW GROUP EXHIBITION THE MORBID PALACE

THE EXHIBITION WILL FEATURE WORKS, IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER, BY:

MARIANA CASTILLO DEBALL, PLAMEN DEJANOFF, LUCA DE LEVA, MARK DION, PETER FEND, INVERNOMUTO, KOO JEONG A, TOBIAS PUTRIH, JORGE QUEIROZ, TOMÁS SARACENO, BOJAN ŠARČEVIĆ, GEORGINA STARR, LUCA TREVISANI, CESARE VIEL.

THE EXHIBITION WILL OPEN ON 27 JUNE 2024, 18-21 H, AND WILL BE ON VIEW UNTIL 27.09.2024

OPENING HOURS: TUESDAY TO SATURDAY, 3 – 7 PM OR BY APPOINTMENT

LOCATION: EX-CHURCH OF THE GUARDIAN ANGEL, VICO SQUARCIAFICO 6R, GENOA – ENTRANCE FROM PIAZZA DELLE SCUOLE PIE

Press release

“We are a blaze in the northern sky” Darkthrone used to sing in the 1990s.

However, we might add in the words of Eugene Thacker that the place of horror, the kind of metaphysical horror that takes place within a materialistic and overtly secular perspective, makes the planet a magical place.

This premise introduces a summer group show by Pinksummer entitled The Morbid Palace, a title also suggested by the place where the exhibition will take place, which will not be the gallery, but a space that has remained secret and abandoned and somehow protected from the asphyxiating logic of late capitalism. The very curious and imposing room is inside a 13th-century building in the city centre, very close to the Cathedral of San Lorenzo: we learned about its existence thanks to our architect friend Valter Scelsi. For centuries the church of the Guardian Angel in Vico Squarciafico, from the beginning of the 20th century until after the Second World War it was instead a power station and was finally forgotten until our exhibition. We thank here the new owners who have just acquired the building for agreeing to lend us this special place and to open it to the public after seventy years with the exhibition The Morbid Palace.

The exhibition, as a gallery group show – although there will also be new works produced for the occasion and an inaugural performance by Georgina Starr, followed by a second performance by Luca De Leva – would perhaps not merit typical press release lucubrations, but for us group shows, rare indeed, are an opportunity to glimpse, in the artists we represent, what we like so much and would like to see in the exhibition. That is to say, that typical attitude that unites them “beyond the belcanto”, that although they all move from a pessimistic perspective, they never resolve it into an intimist contemplation closed within their own affections, but rather it is transformed into a stimulus, an impulse for an active and combative life of the present, a committed one. The attitude for us, somewhat romantically inclined, could be summed up in that letter Lovecraft wrote in 1935 to Catherine L. Moore: ‘If it is to be authentic art, it must primarily depict the crystallisation and symbolisation of a precise human mood, not the delineation of events’.

Yes, the work must restore an atmosphere with respect to “that fruitless human aspiration”, as Shopenhauer would say, that makes aesthetic contemplation the drug that regenerates us, out of the illusion, out of the fear that becomes anxiety, so common in the impending times, in which man for the first time has to deal not only with his ontological inadequacy, but also with the certain fact that the Anthropocene does not provide for heroic solutions.

The exquisitely anti-humanistic approach of The Morbid Palace is only to counter the hybris of mankind in History, with Leopardi the exhibition could enunciate ‘Man is only a very small part of the universe’; however, the anguish is transformed into the stimulus for a new humanism: only when man has acquired, made his own, the conviction that we represent no more than a tiny insignificant aspect of the immense life of universal matter, will we find the strength to overcome hatreds, divisions and find a new universal brotherhood, a civilisation based not on struggle, but on solidarity with respect to a relationship, mediated by consciousness (evolutionary error? ), unequal man-nature relationship that we share with all beings. The different personalities that make up The Morbid Palace seem to aspire to this new civilisation and the exhibition appears, in fact, as an elegy to fragility.