Rome Gallery Tours

Potato Variations | 19 Mar - 27 Apr 2012

Potato Variations, the gallery's first solo show by Lorenzo Lupano 

To reach Potato Variations we go down a dark corridor where we come to a niche containing a minuscule bedroom. The narrow space and the miniature bed are occupied by a disturbing black encumbrance.

Welcome to the askew world of Lorenzo Lupano:

At the top some monkeys are floating in the pale reflection of two little turquoise ponds. Down on the floor we find the still stretched apart feet of a giant frog. It almost seems to have been lying comfortably supine and then suddenly disintegrated: the legs here and today, the rest who knows where and when. At the side, potatoes the size of water-melons sprout an acid and luminous green, and on the walls tiny landslips drag dry roots into the gallery, in the gleam of white turnips.

Armed with thimble, upholsterer's needle, pliers, drill, electric saw and video camera, Lupano folds, twists, cuts, sews and glues a great number of materials, imitating the world as it appears to him, trying to wrest, by emulation, at least some fragments of truth.

Sometimes he compares himself to a mole exploring a vast unknown territory, but in a way opposite to the slothful, nameless protagonist of Dostoevsky's Notes from Undergroundwho maintains that being too aware is an illness, an authentic, absolute illness. Lorenzo Lupano enjoys engaging in a sort of hand to hand combat with reality in order to grasp its secrets.

Part of this apparently light but in no way innocent game is the technique of boycotting any systematic nature in his exploration with calculated distractions and amnesias, in the hope of finding unexpected paths by surprise.

Lupano well knows the illustrious forerunners of this risky game. In his work he appropriates methods, adapting them to his needs, such as that of J. S. Bach who amused himself by breaking up the perfect symmetrical-modular structure of the Goldberg Variations (hence the exhibition title) with the popular ditty Cabbage and red turnips have diverted me from you.

To reduce the preciosity risk (but maybe also to emphasise it) of a series of little drawings and annotations torn from his diaries, he obliges us to bend to see them close up, since he has mounted them low down on the wall, at the mercy of the damp cloth used for cleaning the floor. Who knows whether some elements might not be erased or added, thus altering course at random or by surprise.

We encounter accords between art and reality in the way it appears to us in the too small and too large, too slow and too fast of Lupano's current cataloguing, deliberately left provisional and with apparent carelessness about time.

And while on a wall the peak of the artist's red cap, long as the hand on a tower clock, turns slowly without telling time, two sculptures called Myopes (boxes with funnel eyes, like film-cameras drawn by a child) stare perplexedly into the void in search of a meaning and, projected in a corner, Lupano's coat in miniature stirs firmly on the spot.

Extraspazio
Via Di San Francesco Di Sales 16a
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