"Ri-creazione": Lawrence Carroll.

Pavilion of Holy See

55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

Lawrence Carroll, Tano Festa, Josef Koudelka, Studio Azzurro

In Principio

Arsenale di Venezia - Sale d’Armi nord

Opening of the Pavilion
31 May, 4.30 p.m.

In a pavilion configured as wide open to cultural intersections and emotional pathways, we decided to select, in collaboration with the scientific committee, a group of internationally renowned artists who, in the variety of their languages and techniques, would produce converging characteristics, sensibilities, and openings with reference to the path chosen. The theme of Creation was entrusted to Studio Azzurro, which places the immaterial image, light, sound, and sensory stimuli at the center of their artistic investigation, reflecting on the perceptive dimension of space as a locus of interrelationships through a thoughtful use of new media. Their work triggers a dialogue, awash with echoes and reverberations, between the vegetable and animal kingdoms and the human dimension, which leads, via memory, to other personal narrations on the concept of origins within an interactive plane that is also a temporal intersection. In terms of De-Creazione (Un-Creation), we reflected on whether it would be opportune to explicitly bring the theme to the fore and make it converge with extremely modern questions. Josef Koudelka’s photographs were chosen and organized by the artist himself into a specific and extremely evocative sequence, where themes such as the destruction brought about by war, the material and conceptual consumption of history through time, and the two opposing poles of nature and industry are made to emerge. The photographer’s images expose an abandoned, wounded world, and at the same time are able to transform fragments of reality into works of art bordering on abstraction. With the Ri-Creazione (Re-Creation) we concentrate on the activity of Lawrence Carroll, and in particular those aspects of his work tied to salvaged materials and the processes of transfiguration, which the artist presents both realistically and symbolically together. His is an elaboration that, meditating on the experiences of arte povera, actualizes a continuous and cyclical action of recovery and erosion, of suspension and decline, and of pause and reactivation through the reintroduction of objects into a temporal circuit, forcing fragility and monumentality to coexist. And yet none of the three artistic works can be fully appreciated without recourse to the overall meaning of the three moments as presented in Genesis—each and every one of these moments is able to contain and comprehend the other two. Opening hours: from 10:00 am to 18:00 pm. Closed on Monday (but opened the 3rd of June and the 18th of November 2013)

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