Screening Room: Marcello Maloberti
The ninth chapter of Screening Rooms is devoted to Marcello Maloberti (born in Codogno, Lodi, 1966; lives and works in Milan) and presents the artist’s recent video work RAID, created in 2018 on the occasion of his performance at Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato, curated by its Director, Cristiana Perrella. Performance is Maloberti’s favored medium and his actions, conceived for both institutional as well as public spaces, have a strong interactive impact on the audience. Maloberti's work aims at an involvement that blurs the boundaries between art and life, researching new approaches to photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture, and drawing, as to form a contemporary gesamtkunstwerk.
Video
6' 7" loop
Produced on the occasion of the performance RAID at Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, 2018. A production of Centro Pecci edited by LaGalla23 productions (Andrea Giannone).
“Thirty performers are scattered across the exhibition halls of the Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci among the artworks of the permanent collection. Each performer each hold a monograph of a classical painter that lived between 1300 and 1700. The performers move around the galleries and throw the books on the ground, causing a loud sound that spreads throughout the space. The architecture of the museum resonates and vibrates under the blows of the books in an embrace that releases the energy of classical culture. The collective action and the painterly images of the books contribute to the creation of an exhibition within the exhibition. The gesture is repetitive and never equal, the echo reverberates throughout the space recalling the energy of painting.”
— Marcello Maloberti
“RAID also consists of a photographic work, a triptych, which portrays a selection of books damaged by the performative actions. It’s difficult to look at these destroyed, devastated images of ancient painting since we are so used to seeing them in a state of maximum splendor, and especially because it’s a difficult sight for our gaze to stare. Yet this destructive act also generates a seduction, the fascination with ruin, in this case of books. It also allows me to create a metamorphosis of the image: through the signs of the damage, I aim to modify images that in the collective imagination are static and closed. Here instead the image becomes performative, unstable, enclosing the action’s movement and time, and then returns, as if short-circuited, to being a flat image in the photographic medium that presses everything in our eye.”
— Marcello Maloberti
Three photo inkjet prints
82 × 60 cm; 84 × 62 × 5 cm framed (each)
Ed. 3 + 2 AP
RAID was created in 2018 on the occasion of the fouteenth Giornata del Contemporaneo [Contemporary Art Day] promoted by AMACI which saw Maloberti at the center of an exhibition spread across several Italian museums. For the occasion, the artist also created a guiding image, Medusa, which depicts an Ivorian boy wearing a motorcycle helmet covered with shells.
“The helmet’s roundness is replaced by a jagged shape and its function is modified and brought into a natural dimension attributed with the vegetable kingdom. The exotic somatic traits are juxtaposed with the lightness and fragility of the agglomeration of shells, transforming the boy into a God re-emerged from the depths of the sea. The gaze exchanged between the subject and the viewer, combined with the photograph’s frontal framing, recall the portrait of a contemporary Medusa.”
— Marcello Maloberti
The title of Maloberti’s solo show Sbandata, the result of a dialogue between the artist and the curator Pierre Bal-Blanc, refers to a crush on classical culture. On the occasion of Maloberti’s exhibition the floor of the gallery space in via Stradella 4 was covered with cutouts of classical domes and ceilings, as well as frescos from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, from authors, among others, such as Veronese and Correggio. The installation, titled Trionfo dell’Aurora [Triumph of the Aurora], which references one of the Tiepolo’s frescoes at Villa Baglioni in Massanzago (Padua), created an impossible trompe-l’œil. Walking on the floor gave a sense of vertigo caused by an abundance of images, referring to the digital culture and the overexposure of visual stimuli, typical of contemporary society. In the space there was then only one work on the walls, a portrait of a boy striking a classical-like pose. Here again Maloberti evoked the History of Art and classicism through a performative language and the use of the body.
Photo inkjet print
201 × 121 cm; 204,5 × 123,7 × 8 cm framed
Ed. 3 + 2 AP