Oscar Giaconia | MONITOR
Oscar Giaconia | BHULK
09 feb 2020 – 10 jul 2020
Oscar Giaconia (Milan, 1978) makes his debut at the Monitor Gallery with a group of seven works created specifically for the show BHULK. As well as being the title for the show, BHULK is also the name of the newly recycled works featured in the main areas and the potential derivations the artist is focused on: Hoysteria, The Grinder, Sexual Clumsiness, AYE-AYE, Calabiyau, Ginnungagap, Colon, Master-Mother, The Kitbasher, Unimog Painting Dystopia and Bhulk. An environment set alters the gallery space, which is made to resemble a quasi laboratory where captive images are fabricated as if they were sacrificial hybrids or mythical and mimetic inventions.
The exhibition highlights Oscar Giaconia’s research, which has always comprised a synthesis of dense and layered work, obtained through the breaking down of practices and languages – performance, photography, prosthetic makeup, 3D modelling and drawing – deemed invariably dysfunctional to the pictorial process.
Each work – of which the external elements are intended as structural components – is subject to dissection and sabotage, combining apparently irreconcilable opposite poles (organic / inorganic; matrix master / mystical primer). These offer the artist the chance to conceal the various sources each work feeds on.
Within this setup, the seven works are intertwined under the banner of BHULK: the composition of various signifiers and signified elements: an absurd onomatopoeic and incomprehensible form, a hyperspace of Brane cosmology, a gooey consistency, a granular material, an increase of density caused by compression or an aborted eugenics project.
The exhibition takes its cue from the work BHULK (THE BULL-DOLL), a large scale bio-painting, a bull-like Frankenstein made up of various pieces, forced into captivity by what appears to be a rotting aquarium. Two bull-like gorillas BHULK (THE PITBULL) act as bodyguards to BHULK (THE BULL-DOLL). In the second wing of the show, the diptych BHULK (Mr. O) features a reservoir of heads, perhaps mannequins or unused prosthetics from a set, thrown into coffers, one of which is covered in tartan, a recurring and viral pattern for Oscar Giaconia. A stylistic column of pig snouts U.P.D. CALABIYAU, and the inflatable alien skull immersed in a terrarium, CALABIYAU (I-O I-O), together exacerbate the dimensions of incubation, survival and isolation.
With these mythical animal creatures, Oscar Gianonia proposes a genesis of works in which “everything seems rotten, yet everything is regenerated” (Michel Leiris).
The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue, edited by Claudia Santeroni and published by Lubrina Editore. With essays by Felice Cimatti, professor at the University of Calabria; Federico Ferrari, philosopher; and Andrea Zucchinali, PhD researcher in Theory and Analysis of Artistic and Literary Processes.
MONITOR
Via Sforza Cesarini, 43
Rome
