HISTORY OF THE HUMANITY
The Flat – Massimo Carasi
via Paolo Frisi, 3 (MM Porta Venezia)
Milano 20129 – ITALY
Anthony Coleman – Peter Frederiksen – Antonio Riello – Guadalupe Salgado
Opening Thursday, Nov. 23 from 6 to 9 p.m.
The history of mankind is made up of “weirdos.”
Leaders and adventurers, guards and thieves, builders and saboteurs, dictators and guerrillas but there is no shortage of philosophers and self-styled healers, clowns and acrobats, scientists and artists….
It is peppered with myths, beliefs and religions in which inexplicably, at every latitude, ancestral tales of floods, great achievements, insulting deeds, and momentous battles between good and evil are handed down.
Human history is full of dichotomies where opposites clash, warring leaving victims in the path.
It is the repeated wrong actions that accumulate year after year, century after century, millennium after millennium. In the intimacy of a domestic hearth as in primitive caves, between the Tigris and the Euphrates as between Tikal and Calakmul, with technological weapons as well as with an axe or an arrow.
Four international artists touch on atavistic topics, which have unfortunately returned tragically to the present day, using borderline aesthetics, at times disturbing and provocative, partly because of the same irony or playfulness that is inherent in their favorite materials and techniques.
They express themselves by mixing styles and techniques, drawing comic strips or pop icons with cotton thread or with crayons and pencils, sculpting wool as if it were ceramic, decontextualizing objects or producing sarcastic ready-made.
ANTHONY COLEMAN (1969, lives and works in Philadelphia, USA), a self-taught artist, draws exaggerated portraits of the aforementioned “Strangers” on paper with graffiti and colored pencils: public or television personalities, clowns, singers or dancers are transfigured by hyperbole that becomes the artist’s hallmark, such as noses often more like beaks. The mostly monochrome, brightly colored backgrounds enhance the sublimation of reality. (These subjects are the -transfiguring- characters that fill the days of “Tony Coleman” )
PETER FREDERIKSEN (1987, lives and works in Chicago, USA) draws with a sewing machine, with colored cotton threads, scenes that could be taken from the cartoons of the golden years of American comics. He portrays and ridicules the unhealthy attitudes, insecurities and shallowness of the individual man as well as of “community” life, which is often made up of bullying and broken promises.
ANTONIO RIELLO (1958, lives and works between Bassano del Grappa and London) eclectically stages the contradictions and paradoxes of Western society. In a continuous anthropological research, he feeds and returns reflections on the difficult human coexistence through sarcasm and irony. Ready-made compositions, sculpture, and large ballpoint pen drawings outline only a small part of the artist’s vast and varied exploration.
GUADALUPE SALGADO (1991, lives and works in Mexico City) through varied and articulate textile art, displays imagery and iconography derived from a collective baggage that shows us satire in tragedy. It so happens that the work “Sacrificios” is composed with cartoonish strokes by a large pink bow that could be Minnie’s towering over a copious pile of bones. Of a different make, however, is the iconic bison skull (impossible not to think of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings), sculpturally made of powder-pink wool.
