Venice, with CHUTZPAH exhibition opens new space for art at Procuratie Vecchie

CHUTZPAH. A tent that’s not a tent, animals that aren’t animals is the title of Atelier dell’Errore BIG’s exhibition project, curated by Gabi Scardi, which inaugurates The Art Studio, the new area dedicated to contemporary art inside Venice’s Procuratie Vecchie. The imposing building, which is opening its doors for the first time in its five-hundred-year history, has just been renovated by David Chipperfield Architects, with interior and exhibition design by Migliore+Servetto Architects, to become the home of The Human Safety Net, the Assicurazioni Generali Foundation that helps people in vulnerable conditions to express their potential by improving their living conditions and those of the entire community.

The Art Studio is a large room of about 200 square meters, which was created with the idea of displaying artworks that interpret the themes that The Human Safety Net’s work focuses on, represented in the permanent interactive exhibition A World of Potential. The works set up inside The Art Studio are made with the particular language developed in recent years by Atelier dell’Errore (AdE), founded in 2002 in Reggio Emilia by Luca Santiago Mora with the intention of putting artistic practice at the service of child neuropsychiatry. Starting in 2015, some of the children involved in the project, who have now become adults, became part of AdE BIG, an art collective and social enterprise housed within the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia. AdE’s founding principle is to value limitations, to reevaluate what we normally tend to push away, try to neutralize or correct as error, even at the cost of forcing norms and habits of thought.

Hence the title of the exhibition, CHUTZPAH, which is part of the permanent exhibition A World of Potential: a Yiddish term for the brazenness of those who believe in themselves excessively. Over the years, the term has been taken up in Anglo-Saxon parlance with reference to personal confidence, the reckless drive that allows one to break out of established patterns and perform actions that were impossible for others. Courage and boldness are certainly characteristics that can be associated with AdE’s posture, the origin of the choices, manners, and even the unconventional use of traditional techniques from art history. CHUTZPAH is, in fact, the result of borderline obsessive work through which the collective is able to achieve levels of extreme technical virtuosity. CHUTZPAH is thus thepersonal declination of "courage," one of the strengths that the visitor encounters in the interactive path A World of Potential, aimed at discovering one’s own potential.

In The Art Studio one finds oneself in the presence of a series of works of environmental proportions, created specifically for this place. Pater, the Over-Lived is a large two-dimensional structure dividing the space in two, made of two almost antithetical materials: on one side, red AdETEX, a fabric specially created by stretching meters of work tape on the canvas, with a large metal leaf design; on the other, a warm recycled camel wool, called Cameluxe. Tenda-Mater is a self-supporting tent made of the same materials: on the inside it is covered with soft wool while the outer surface, an alarming red, bears an organic, metamorphic golden figure. Completing the exhibition is the large zoomorphic drawing Mater GB7, in many colors and gold leaf, and the series of 12 drawings entitled Oracular Cells: fluctuating nuclei of energy different from each other.

Pater, the Over-living and Tent-Mater are the two large, primordial golden figures that stand out on the red monochrome panel and tent, respectively. Viewed both through the imaginative of transfiguring art, the former is conceived with a body composed of bags, vases and funnels, and tubes. The tent is also placed in the space so as to encompass the last oculus of the facade overlooking St. Mark’s Square. The view can be perceived by those who are willing to lower themselves to the floor to look through: a metaphor for the complex relationship between subjective interiority and external reality and the transforming power of art, especially since the light that penetrates through the oculus is filtered through a colored diaphragm that affects the perception of reality.

Venice, with CHUTZPAH exhibition opens new space for art at Procuratie Vecchie

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