Jarach Gallery

The Hundredth Window

Artists
Giorgio Barrera (Cagliari, 1969), Simone Bergantini (Velletri, 1977), Guido Guidi (Cesena, 1941), Yamada Hanako (Ponte dell'Olio, 1986), Kensuke Koike (Nagoya, 1980), Teodoro Lupo (Treviso, 1975), Yusuke Nishimura (Okayama, 1981), Daniele Pezzi (Ravenna, 1977), Mirko Smerdel (Prato, 1978).

JARACH GALLERY | San Marco 1997 | Campo San Fantin | 30124 Venezia | Italy
Opening Time: Tuesday - Saturday 2 - 8.00 p.m | Sunday and Monday by appointment
www.jarachgallery.com | info@jarachgallery.com | T & F +39 041 522 1938

Jeff: You know, much as I hate to give Thomas J. Doyle too much credit, he might have gotten ahold of something when he said that was pretty private stuff going on out there.
I wonder if it is ethical to watch a man with binoculars and a long-focus lens.
Do you, do you suppose it's ethical even if you prove that he didn't commit a crime?
Lisa: I'm not much on rear-window ethics.
Jeff: Of course, they can do the same thing to me.
Watch me like a bug under a glass if they want to.
Lisa: Jeff, you know if someone came in here, they wouldn't believe what they'd see.
[courtesy Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, Rear Window]

GIORGIO BARRERA

The issues and questions raised by the invincible ambiguity of Barrera’s work become inevitable. What are we watching? What do we see? And what remains inaccessible, hidden between the folds of the image and beyond the frame? Watching generates an impetus to understand, to know, but the perception of complicity between the artist and the people portrayed, of a willed ambiguity between realism and fiction, leaves the spectator inhibited. His or her claim to decodify each image in an unequivocal way, as authentic or counterfeit, is openly challenged. Does not the fact that these dwellings seem to be transformed into a sort of cinematographic set, perhaps, preclude the fact that the protagonists are real people portrayed in their own houses? Did those people really go to a friend’s party and is that woman really lying on the floor amidst her child’s toys? Deep down, they interpret a credible version of themselves, within a possible situation, in a manner that is not dissimilar to an infinitude of other circumstances of life. Perhaps these stories more than being true, as they would have us believe, are plausible. But can we say that they are false?
If we are dealing with authentic stories, it is because the images that portray them are composed of countless elements of truth, to which we no longer know what value to attribute.
[text by Daniele De Luigi for the exhibition “Storie Vere, True Stories”]

SIMONE BERGANTINI

Every foreign body is a black box.
The black boxes are the wrappings which we will never be able to penetrate and understand completely.

GUIDO GUIDI

"Non sono un filosofo, semmai lo è Guido Guidi, che a parole tace, ma parla con le sue fotografie, immagini da leggersi senza porsi troppe domande, fotografie da analizzare nella loro identità iconica ( estetica?), che lì è particolarmente misteriosa, come lo è in effetti, il nesso di quella realtà.
Guidi, da circa quarant'anni, compie una marcia dalla Lunga Posa, non soltanto fotografica, nella ricerca di una sua verità Fotografica, coerente con la sua idea del mondo, senza la quale c'è il nulla, e non avrebbe senso né la Fotografia, né la cosiddetta arte."
Testo di Italo Zannier, Guido Guidi | La Lunga Posa. Fotografie dell'archivio di Italo Zannier, Fratelli Alinari, Firenze 2006.

YAMADA HANAKO

Every day, just woke up, the artist took a picture of what she saw from the window of home in Venice. Date and time of the shoot as caption.

KENSUKE KOIKE

It’s the view from the household door of a world famous mouse. But everything out there is totally abandoned; the family has vanished during the night taking everything with them leaving the door open. It’swinter, a cold wind is blowing. It seems the end of everything. The mouse suddenly knows he will have to face life on his own. He lived off the family up to now, though never being part of it.
The installation consists of a wooden box and other objects. Everything inside the box is phony, just as in the world of cartoons. But what you see through the mouse’s door is quite real. The leaves, cut shaped and painted one by one, represent the threshold between the real and the imaginary world. The project works on the oscillations of a pendulum that intersects this boundary.

TEODORO LUPO

Even in a sad situation, I have always tried to capture and highlight the signs that made me realize that in those rooms a business would be back soon. I wanted to see those empty spaces as a statement of possibilities waiting to come true. Thing revealed itself as correct some years later.

“MandCbuildahouse” comes instead when I run out a certain type of ability, the ability to print new problems and hopefully solutions on the photo paper . The attempt to clear it through these images is a failed attempt, indeed, their complexity leads also deeper questions, and in that moment I left incomplete the series and begin to testing other materials. After a rather long tour that took me to sculpture and to the installation, I finally resumed and concluded the series “Clear your mind (wrong directions to)”.

YUSUKE NISHIMURA

Depending on the season, the weather, and time of day, the sun emits different colors of light due to the refraction and the distance from the sun to the earth. Each day’s gradual shift in the color temperature is subtle yet unique.
Each photograph is the result of my observation of light throughout a day. I set up a piece of paper by the window as the sun comes up, take a picture on transparency, patiently wait until the color of daylight changes, take another picture, and continue this process until the sun goes down. The result is a series of monochromatic transparencies.
Oddly, the resulting image looks as if it is a painting, although the way I compose an image is different to that of a painter. The colors I apply to my work are obtained photographically, so they are indexical to the time they are observed.

A seconda della stagione, il tempo, e l’ora del giorno, il sole emette diversi colori della luce a causa della rifrazione e la distanza dal sole alla terra. Ogni giorno la graduale variazione del colore della luce è sottile ma unica. DANIELE PEZZI

… I [am] the Thought of the Father, Protennoia, that is, Barbelo, the perfect Glory, and the immeasu-rable Invisible One who is hidden. I am the Image of the Invisible Spirit, and it is through me that the All took shape, and (I am) the Mother (as well as) the Light which she appointed as Virgin, she who is called ‘Meirothea’, the incomprehensible Womb, the unrestrainable and immeasurable Voice…
[“Trimorphic Protennoia”, Sethian Gnostic text from the New Testament apocrypha, as traslated from the only surviving copy in the Nag Hammadi library]

MIRKO SMERDEL

A series of images taken by a camera that photographs the aura of people (Kirlian Camera). Every colour refers to specific mental qualities, emotions and chakras.
Photos shows details of the book “Dalla meccanizzazione all’automazione nei servizi bancari” (from mechanization to automation in banking services), from Unicredit historical archive, about the electronic computer Gamma60.
Making visible, through a “factitious” operation, the disappearance of memory connected to Gamma60 and the building that contained it: the memory of the photographed book, the memory of Olivetti and its political implications, the memory of Mario Mulas (the author of the pictures in the book), and so on, in a stratification of different layers of reading.