Isabelle Cornaro, Luca Frei, Falke Pisano
Galerie Balice Hertling at Galerie Neu, MD 72, Berlin, Germany
Falke Pisano, The I and the You (version III) (2009)
The problem with international gallery exchanges is that they tend to produce disembodied shows: art works randomly transported into spaces for which they weren’t intended and into gallery cultures in which they feel displaced. This group show is part of this year’s Berlin–Paris gallery exchange and, whether by accident or intention, its virtues are those you would least expect of an exchange. The three installations by artists from the roster of Paris’s Balice Hertling hang together as separate but interconnected engagements with the grand belle-étage interior of Neu’s project space. It is a frame that can appear to coerce or intimidate faint-hearted work. These installations are anything but: they challenge the gallery’s high style.
Falke Pisano’s The I and the You (version III) (2009) is an encampment of brightly-coloured fabrics stretched over a structure of bamboo rods. Pamphlets about Hélio Oiticica’s Tropicália, a seminal installation from 1967, are suspended from string. Oiticica’s piece, on which Pisano has modelled hers, was an attempt to offset ethnic environments with Western Modernism. All the trappings of Pisano’s installation, however, are redolent of the mainstream cultures that Oiticica was inveighing against, from a recording of the artist’s voice sounding like a bad translation – or a bad parody – of post-structuralist philosophy, to the referential nature of the pamphlet itself. The installation is an ersatz Postmodern take on Oiticica, and ultimately has more to do with the American art of the 1990s that exploited the ambiguities between abstraction and design (for example, works from that period by Andrea Zittel and Jorge Pardo). Pure design, serving no purpose, masquerades as functional architecture. In one of the modules, a panel lowers like a hatch from strings, as though to allow something in or out, but proves to be merely a formalistic diagonal echoing the diamond configurations of bamboo reinforcing the screens behind.
Luca Frei, What Time is It? (2009)
Amidst the room’s marble ledges and decorative parquet, Pisano’s piece appears as one form of artifice set off against its antithesis: the ethnic and the classical. In the connecting room, Luca Frei has erected a series of sculptures (What Time is It?, 2009) – like three-metre-high tubes segmented lengthways – which clash and chime in their own way with the gallery interior. Constructed from MDF roughly coated with plaster and white paint, they pun on the moulded stucco of the ceilings and doorways. The installation is inventively contradictory, a barrier blocking your way between the two main rooms, and also a maze that seduces you into its curves. The sculptures torque unevenly as they rise, like cartoon versions of Richard Serra’s ‘Torqued Ellipses’. If they are monolithically static they are also illustrations of movement, a kind of neo-Futurism.
Isabelle Cornaro, Landscape with Poussin and Eyewitnesses (III) (2010)
Occupying the final room, Isabelle Cornaro’s Landscape with Poussin and Eyewitnesses (III) (2010) merges with the gallery’s splendour rather than resisting it. It is a study of bourgeois cultural pretensions. Plywood plinths among rolls and spreads of Asian-style carpet support arrangements of objects. The installation apparently represents the layout of a painting by Nicolas Poussin, an artist known for constructing detailed maquettes of his landscape compositions from which to paint. It is a three-dimensional tableau to be perceived frontally, like a picture, obeying the rules of illusionistic perspective, with objects diminishing in size as they recede. It might be a taxonomy of middle-class aspirations: a china pheasant, a fan, a cake mould, various buttons, a make-up compact. The choice of objects as ‘quotations’ of a type – signs more than specifics – outweighs a sense of particularity which would open onto nostalgia. Like Pisano, Cornaro is faultlessly Postmodern. There is a pseudo-scientific aspect to the selection, with compasses and slide-rules suggesting different means of measuring space, and acting as metaphors for Cornaro’s own process. Everything here is second-hand and self-reflexive and purposely so, not only the array of knick-knacks but the ironic post-Broodthaers objectification of exhibition conventions. All three artists emerge from the strict confines of that critique, as much as from the gallery’s stylized décor, and are let free to play.
Mark Prince
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