Venice 2013: Antoni Muntadas, David Rickard, Catherine Lorent

Three short interviews with artists showing in Venice during the 2013 Biennale, interviewed by Fedra Boscaro, AEliamedia.org, and Federica Patti, LaRete Art Projects produced in partnership with the Clocktower Gallery and Radio:

Antoni Muntadas, Venetian Protocols I, Michela Rizzo Gallery

David Rickard, All Vertical Lines Intersect, Michela Rizzo Gallery

Catherine Lorent, Relegation, Luxembourg Pavilion Ca’ del Duca

Antoni Muntadas (Venetian Protocols I) dedicates his work to projects that involve the use of mediums in order to serve social or political purposes. His work develops on two levels: perception and information, where the former acts on an emotive level and the latter stimulates reasoning. In Michela Rizzo Art Gallery, Muntadas, observing Venice, draws attention to the forms which he identifies as "protocols" in Venice. Operating from a personal perspective, the author sheds light upon the dynamics of living in the Lagoon today: protocols that become essential, reinventing themselves and adapting to the passing of time.

Venetian Protocols I, the first phase of a project on Venice, is composed of a collection of images in which the artist reveals the norms that regulate life in the city, creating a patchwork in which the inhabitants develop their respective existences. Muntadas considers these rules as shadows and indispensible reflections of the history of Venice that materialise in vestiges, traces and signs--aesthetics of a particular architecture.

The underlying ambition of the project is to reveal the quotidian side of the city hidden from the eyes of the tourist, deconstructing and dismantling reality, replacing it with fragments or clues. What emerges is an image of a city marked by the paradox of a local culture that has been subjected to a process of internationalization that inevitably impacts upon the evolution of its protocols.

David Rickard: Michela Rizzo Gallery presents the New Zealander in a solo exhibition. Interested in the dynamics that link art and space Rickard experiencied in all his work the different modes for giving voice to this report. The first work that will welcome viewers is Outer Reaches, a bronze bell that descends from the ceiling to the center of the room, and remains in a static position.
Curator: Elena Forin.

Catherine Lorent: The title of the sound installation shown at the Luxembourg Pavilion—Relegation—refers to the longstanding rejection, or "banishment," of Baroque in the history of art, nowhere more pervasive than in Venice, where late Baroque architecture was stifled in its development by "anti-Baroque polemics." Contrary to similar Baroque-averse tendencies in the current Berlin art canon, Lorent’s work posits the formal vocabulary of Baroque, which is often dismissed as absurd, wasteful and pathetic, as a central reference point. Citing pamphlets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Lorent, who holds a PhD in art history, appropriates Baroque iconography relating to concepts of the sublime, power and domination, while highlighting the absurdities and contradictions which Baroque artists themselves had been very much aware of. For binary models fall short of explaining the complexities of the world: good and bad or ratio and religio may be antagonistic concepts, but in reality they are closely intertwined.

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