Galerie Mazzoli inaugurate
Breakdown, second solo exhibition in Berlin space by
Christian Fogarolli (Trento, Italy, 1983).
In Christian Fogarolli's artistic practice, past and present intertwine in works that hybridize different expressive methods: photography, installation, sculpture, and painting; traces and fragments of an
indefinite time bind themselves to vitreous, mirroring, metallic, organic and technological materials.
The exhibition offers the public the opportunity to interact with a body of new installation works in which the separation of body and mind, normality
and deviance are questioned, with the intention of stimulating a reflection on the normative attributions of illness, marginalization and categorization in our society.
Breakdown presents a path involving the destruction of images, whether real or false; figures and features are subjected to physical strain through tools, utensils or
actions that invade their surface, extracting a living matter from them.
In the large installation entitled Le Pendu, for example, photographic images from old asylums’ archives are manipulated into abstract shapes and subsequently
hooked to metal chains and hung from the walls like bodies or shreds of flesh in a butcher’s wearhouse. Le Pendu literally embodies the marginalization of
the sick. It epitomizes the annihilation of humanness, transforming a portrait into a severe sculpture, a seemingly organic element that emanates the reminiscence of a useless existence.
Similarly, in the works Cut memories and Crush test, metal sheets imprinted with pigments are compressed, cut, and crushed by a dough cutting machine and a bench vise respectively. Such brutal
manipulations function as actions of memory destruction as well as metaphors for the constant psychological pressures present in contemporary society.
The technological installation Eternal Return, on the other hand, reflects on the concepts of repetition and individuality. This piece portrays a clock mechanism juxtaposed to a
green-colored glass fragment that reproduces itself endlessly through an optical effect. Due to the reflective nature of the work’s surface, the viewer’s own image is
reverberating within it. In this case, Fogarolli challenges the representation of the viewer him/herself, whose face is again dehumanized to become part of a living
mechanism, a technological contraption reminding us that we exist not only as singularities, but as context-dependent, replaceable and duplicable cogs in clock wheels
driven by forces, starting with time, beyond our control.
The above described works exemplify the peculiar traits of the exhibition, and more in general of Fogarolli’s production as a whole, which consistently expounds a form
of psychological conceptualism that is polymorphic in nature as much as it is thematically coherent. The title of the exhibition, Breakdown, in its multiple meanings of collapse
and classification, perfectly summarizes such traits. In Breakdown the combination of sculpture, painting, print, and found objects allows Fogarolli to reaffirm his fascination with
archival practices and human psychology, and to create a set of artworks whose originality is evident as much as is his desire to drive the public to self introspection and criticism.
