Artericambi Artericambi via A. Cesari 10 37131 Verona Italy (city map) Send E-mail tel +39 (0)45 - 52 90 35 www.artericambi.org

Artericambi presents Giovanni Morbin’s new exhibition called “ ricomposizione” (Recomposition) ,following the 2005 one called “I’ve got you under my skin “. After the recent scandal aroused by his artwork “ Fioriera” (Flower box) displayed at our gallery stand at “Artissima” fair , this exhibition allows a better understanding of Morbin’s artistic attitude: in fact for him the process of interpreting signs is more important than the sign itself.

The exhibition “ricomposizione” is an organic project , formed by independent works which deal with the same theme and tension. Minimal presence and intervention – such as a wallboard slit by a glass plate that becomes a stand for “the other”, a “fake video” and a sound installation – aim at upsetting and underlining the diaphragm of architectural space and invite the onlooker to stop and think about his own presence inside that specific container. To pay attention to the encounter between the “phenomenon” and the spectator , in order to deepen the latter’s care when dealing with everyday routine, arises a new question : what is sculpture today.
The answer , that Morbin has always been looking for, seems to coincide and realize in the act of creation itself ,as any product today can be seen as a sculpture. The artist is interested in the process and ability of the “artwork” to become a gadget able to stimulate the observer’s imagination. The work “ antimateria “(antimatter) 2006 is a polystyrene cube with a blackened surface. In this case the purity and conceptual immateriality of geometrical abstraction meet the informal physical matter. Actually the artwork is the result of wearing out a metal object through the use of a lapping machine in order to obtain white hot waste which is then shot against the cube that is thus carved and gouged. This presence , for its surrealistic immanence, even before the knowledge about the process and the gesture , produces in the observer the sensation that it deals with something that goes beyond not only the mere work of gestaltic geometric abstraction , but also the simple object stolen from real experience.
Morbin’s works are the effort to reconcile two apparently very different ways of sign codification: one dealing with art and geometric abstraction and the other dealing with real life such as politics ( this is clear in his previous works such as “fontana” 2006, the portraits of people made with blood on paper forming a texture similar to capillaries, “ forza nuova “ 2005 and “spacewalk” 2005 ). His aim is to underline and therefore make us think of the meaning of the signs that come to us , that we produce and repeat everyday. For this reason this is a work about the identity and certainty that man gives himself in order to explain his presence in the world both about commonplaces and more refined signs linked to the sublimation of ideas or artworks. This might clash against Morbin’s apparently rational and analytical works about language and its structure ; on the contrary it’s only a way to stimulate an atmosphere and a situation for wonder and epiphany in the onlooker in order to give importance more to the mental consideration than to the object itself or the process through which it has come into being. His work deals with the concept of matter transformation and the creation of an epiphany of the eyes watching reality while living it.
The “fake video” presents a sequence of photographs where the artist throws a handful of metal powder into the air in a romantic and unreal mountain surrounding. The metal powder is the result of the disintegration of a former sculpture object; in this way it joins together subject, space and time. The action is suspended, it’s a mantra : it has neither beginning nor end. The artist doesn’t want to represent or witness a particular action : he wants to evoke a sensation and an attitude of intense observation making the concept of the length of time real, as permitted by the condition of the repetition of the same. The dimension of time , as Peter Hadke says, allows us to move between past and future and pay attention to our wonder when meeting a magic , unique, original moment so that we can ponder over our conscience of things. Morbin knows very well that in order to realize a reflection about one’s own identity – not to be only an abstract analysis – it’s necessary to face the collective conscience a man belongs to.
For this reason the sculptures “antimateria” 2008 assault and grasp the real space of the gallery , its ceiling and corners, to stimulate and stop the attention on that empty space to be filled , run through and lived. Only a sharing of that space makes these gadgets active, abstract sculptures/objects formed by small cubes on whose sides different parts of the same photo appear: the meeting between the artist and his surrounding because of the sculptural throw. In fact the artist means to say that phenomena don’t exist by themselves but they spring only from intention and project or when they are lived , used and shared. This was already clear in “ scultura sociale” 2003, formed by 400 stainless steel lathed modules which modify the functional daily elements like a virus (like the legs of the table or the door handle which can be duplicated ) creating a new consciousness of the observer’s presence in usual daily gestures. . In this exhibition the artist attains a further new goal. Things exist not only when we use them but also when we imagine them and have the courage to talk about all their possible interpretations in order to ponder the relationship between history, memory, future and present. In this perspective we can understand better the artwork exhibited in the stand of Artericambi at Artissima 2008. The work “fioriera” (flower box) formed by a wall bas-relief in the shape of a svastika with flowers in it , forced the spectators to think over again about the use of that symbol and what it represents. The faces of the people are mirrored in an aesthetical structure that is reassuring because it’s an accepted design object and needs our daily attention to keep the flowers alive in it, which explains its existence.
Emphasizing the mechanism of collective communication , the artist warns us that it’s everybody’s responsibility to be aware of these mechanisms in order not to be overcome by them . The need to control and the need to be aware of reality - the two tensions defining the human soul - meet when the notion that not everything can be schematized and that there are rationally unexplainable aspects of reality is accepted., and for this reason we must keep our attention on the will to understand the point of view from which we watch the world and share the signs of and in the world.