NYAB Event - "Reality, what Reality?" Exhibition

"Reality, what Reality?" Exhibition

Onishi Gallery

This event has ended.

Onishi Gallery presents “Real­ity, What Real­ity?” a group exhi­bi­tion curated by Ste­fa­nia Car­rozzini.
A group of selected artists, mostly from Italy, been asked to rep­re­sent an indi­vid­ual sense of real­ity. With an increas­ing of a great influx and mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion over­whelmed stim­uli we are obliged to swim in a pre­car­i­ous and fluid flood, liq­uid and con­tin­u­ally chang­ing with no sin­gle real ref­er­ent point.

“In the age of tech­nol­ogy and data com­mu­ni­ca­tion the world is pre­sented through means of images. Images in real time, com­mu­ni­ca­tion in real time are the result not of an increase in uni­ver­sal knowl­edge, but of an in increase in tech­nol­ogy.
Our times are obsessed by real events. Indeed, but what is Real? There is no doubt that we live in a cul­ture of avalanche of images and infor­ma­tion. Every­thing has to be seen, every­thing has to be vis­i­ble. Yet this excess of vis­i­bil­ity in the end nul­li­fies every­thing. It is a bit like the myth of Orpheus and Euridice. Orpheus turns round to look at her and Euridice dis­ap­pears for­ever into Hades.

These thoughts sprang to mind after read­ing the book by David Shields “Real­ity Hunger, a man­i­festo”. By means of apho­risms, the author gets right to the point of real­ity in rela­tion to art. In parts Shields is near the vision of Bau­drillard when he affirms that our cul­ture lives in the para­dox of exces­sive real­ity, just as a bulimic per­son will eat enor­mous quan­ti­ties of food (read infor­ma­tion and images) only to expel it all, and this crav­ing for food-images trans­lates into its exact oppo­site, the void, in the anx­i­ety and the con­tin­u­ous desire for a real­ity tied to expe­ri­ence and to human rela­tions. Artists nec­es­sar­ily have to come to terms with their times or be exiled from his­tory and they are the per­fect anti­dote to every form of pre­var­i­ca­tion inher­ent in the sys­tem of imposed images, from the dom­i­na­tion of tech­no­cratic thought neces­si­tated by con­sump­tion. The free­dom not only of expres­sion but of our very being is at stake. How to resist the ten­dency to reduce our lives to a media fic­tion? “The role of art – Pierre Restany wrote – is to awaken and purify the spirit”.

All philoso­phers have ques­tioned them­selves about what real­ity is with­out ever reach­ing a com­plete and exhaus­tive def­i­n­i­tion. Fore­most amongst them all, Niet­zsche, who hav­ing fore­seen the advent of nihilism, the cul­ture which we are liv­ing today, exhorted us to be our­selves. Today a lot of our energy is directed towards a real­ity of appear­ances and con­for­mity. The “know your­self” is the light which illu­mi­nates human exis­tence. It is what the Greeks called eude­mo­nia, refer­ring to those who cre­ated their own “demon”, or rather their own spe­cific virtue, the rea­son why we have come into the world. For this artists, by look­ing in and look­ing out, are the ones who more than any­one else can answer the ques­tion which as it hap­pens is also the title of this exhi­bi­tion: Real­ity, What Real­ity? Because in the never-rending flow of global com­mu­ni­ca­tion, it is the assid­u­ous patrons of the reign of the sym­bolic, of the invis­i­ble and the vis­i­ble, who are the ideal inter­preters of this dual real­ity. In syn­the­sis: real or vir­tual, art has to stir deep emo­tions”.( Ste­fa­nia Carrozzini)
Poetry read­ing: Ste­fano Losi, “Under the Burnt Walls”

Ste­fano Losi, Ital­ian poet and artist based in New York, will read at the open­ing of the show a col­lec­tion of epi­grams from the vol­ume “Under the Burnt Walls”, issued last March.

The exhi­bi­tion is com­posed of 24 art­works: pho­tographs and paint­ings.
The cat­a­logue is avail­able at the gallery.

Media

• Painting
• Photography

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