Public improvisations
Public improvisations
1- 4
2008
Collage on paper
24 x 33 cm
Kunstsammlung Kanton Zürich, CH
"Fragile Monuments"
Suzie Q Projects
Galerie Bob Van Orsouw
With Stefan Burger, Aurélien Gamboni, Basim Magdy, Kilian Rüthemann, Hagar Schmidhalter
“Bob van Orsouw invited Eva Scharrer to serve as guest curator for the second exhibition in his new project room, Suzie Q. The result was a small group show bringing together six artists currently living in Switzerland. "Fragile Monuments" assembled a range of skeptical positions regarding the grand public monument, a fitting sentiment in a small country with a long tradition of direct democracy and strategic understatement. But perhaps more importantly, these artists explore the notion of fragility in relation to modernism's heroic claims, particularly its championing of the self-reflexivity of artistic media. For instance, Davide Cascio returns again and again to Le Corbusier's Purist mandate of an "esprit nouveau." But rather than arriving at a conclusive critique of modernism, Cascio evaluates its maxims both from a historical standpoint and with regard to their lasting potential. The collages represented here were inspired by Yona Friedman's "architecture mobile," yet they also pointed to the artist's larger conceptual, installation-based approach: In Black Polyhedra, 2003, he makes use of the same rationalist point of departure he uses for his walk-in structures, showing us Joyce's Ulysses as a self-contained polyperspectival text. Black Map, 2007, uses monochrome black panels to cover a linenbacked map (only the word map is left peeking through) that shows the putative result when all the white space has vanished from a map because every last bit of the world has been marked on the page.”
Hans Rudolf Reust
Artforum Inc. May 2009. Translated from German by Oliver E. Dryfuss.
Davide Cascio, in his collages and installations, is engaged with modernist utopias and their possible transformation. His fantastic architectural and urban scenarios operate like formal, mental orchestrations that, inspired by the theories of Yona Friedman, follow the logic of the unplannable, the anti-monumental and the anti-ideological. The geometrical rigour of the "architectures" elaborated by the artist, in which one sees the influence of the radical Architecture of the 1960s, does not exclude figurative elements. In his collages, a technique which the artist often employs, the 'coupling' of photographic fragments taken from diverse sources serves to delineate utopian landscapes or else to furnish fragments of reality in abstract compositions in which one sees his interest for the ornamental schemes of the Islamic tradition.
Eva Scharrer
Suzie Q Projects
Galerie Bob Van Orsouw
With Stefan Burger, Aurélien Gamboni, Basim Magdy, Kilian Rüthemann, Hagar Schmidhalter
“Bob van Orsouw invited Eva Scharrer to serve as guest curator for the second exhibition in his new project room, Suzie Q. The result was a small group show bringing together six artists currently living in Switzerland. "Fragile Monuments" assembled a range of skeptical positions regarding the grand public monument, a fitting sentiment in a small country with a long tradition of direct democracy and strategic understatement. But perhaps more importantly, these artists explore the notion of fragility in relation to modernism's heroic claims, particularly its championing of the self-reflexivity of artistic media. For instance, Davide Cascio returns again and again to Le Corbusier's Purist mandate of an "esprit nouveau." But rather than arriving at a conclusive critique of modernism, Cascio evaluates its maxims both from a historical standpoint and with regard to their lasting potential. The collages represented here were inspired by Yona Friedman's "architecture mobile," yet they also pointed to the artist's larger conceptual, installation-based approach: In Black Polyhedra, 2003, he makes use of the same rationalist point of departure he uses for his walk-in structures, showing us Joyce's Ulysses as a self-contained polyperspectival text. Black Map, 2007, uses monochrome black panels to cover a linenbacked map (only the word map is left peeking through) that shows the putative result when all the white space has vanished from a map because every last bit of the world has been marked on the page.”
Hans Rudolf Reust
Artforum Inc. May 2009. Translated from German by Oliver E. Dryfuss.
Davide Cascio, in his collages and installations, is engaged with modernist utopias and their possible transformation. His fantastic architectural and urban scenarios operate like formal, mental orchestrations that, inspired by the theories of Yona Friedman, follow the logic of the unplannable, the anti-monumental and the anti-ideological. The geometrical rigour of the "architectures" elaborated by the artist, in which one sees the influence of the radical Architecture of the 1960s, does not exclude figurative elements. In his collages, a technique which the artist often employs, the 'coupling' of photographic fragments taken from diverse sources serves to delineate utopian landscapes or else to furnish fragments of reality in abstract compositions in which one sees his interest for the ornamental schemes of the Islamic tradition.
Eva Scharrer