Giuliana Rosso – Bored Bones
Giuliana Rosso – Bored Bones
Giuliana Rosso, Abisso, 2023.
Detail. Courtesy of the artist and The Address.
Text

Proposing techniques and materials dear to Rosso’s research, such as charcoal on spolvero paper, papier-mâché and oil on canvas, Bored Bones is composed of new environmental installations, sculptures and paintings poised between reality and imagination, consistency and allusion, gravity and lightness.   

Populated by subjects portrayed in situations of quiet uncertainty and transience, Bored Bones is configured as a place open to individual discovery, an invitation to recover, activate and nurture the sense of adventure and wonder that endearingly cradled the runs on our bright May afternoons.

At the entrance we find a work leaning against the wall. It seems to be in the process of being set up, or taken down before being packed away again. Maybe the exhibition installers took a break, maybe they went for a drink somewhere, or to eat ice cream, or lunch. Who knows.

We notice that the screws are plastic, oversized, unreal, as if materialized from a cartoon. On the floor, next to the painting, a pair of toy pliers and a toy screwdriver.

The installation/uninstallation of this work is a statement of the artist’s poetics, of the state of her subjects, always portrayed in situations of transience. Like the work at the entrance, they are both ready and not ready. Or, they are ready but do not seem so. Or again, they are not ready, but are presented as such. Ready, ready, one must always be ready. But ready for what?

Light, floating figures greet us beyond the thick door of a safe room. Pay attention to them: they are as large as we are, perhaps slightly larger. Their fragile frame is reflected in ours, and our frailties lend stability and weight to the context. Stretched out vertically, they watch us. As we leave the room, they drop their colors.

Transitions of state with water that does not wet and fire that does not heat. Ardently soaking wet. These works portray what they fear the most.

Here we enter through a wall of closed shutters. Maybe we don’t have permission, maybe we should. Who can tell. Lightning gutters and ink novels. “Feather forecast. Carpal diem. Water those far fair fires?”

Maybe we are in a burrow, and being in here reminds us that long ago we were looking at a flooded room inside a stove, a boulder on the sheets, comet eyebrows and hairline cracks. A burrow, a tunnel, a tunnel in a tunnel under the leaps of frogs. The arachno-design of Puddle Mansion.

Smear that mirror on the wall, may you steer her with your drawl.

In this room, sleeping characters, or characters who are about to sleep, and their dream world is presented as real. But to whom is that world real? For us? For them? Perhaps we are manifestations of their fantasies.

Let’s be quiet, let’s move slowly or we might wake up.

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