« At the beginning, the first gesture, the inaugural gesture was to cast the Earth, like an ironic demiurge, by objectifying it and clinging to the material– plaster and concrete– to save the imprint before its disappearance. Lulù Nuti still dwelled in the "age of spheres" as described by Peter Sloterdijk, the time when one believed to be able to hold the earth in their hands, from a block. Now in the shadow of suspicion, that period seems definitively over. After exhilarating views of the cosmos, after having set sail on modern caravels, it is now a question of finding mother earth– here lies bitterness, perhaps. Some debris from these journeys both near and far lie like fragments dispersed from a persistent hope, despite everything. These pieces of globes stand as the sedimented remains of an ambition thus perpetuated out of concern for responsibility– not to throw anything away– and a desire to keep the traces of a past condemned to crumble yet persists.
Because Lulù Nuti modestly invites us to enter the bitter land of memory. The collapsing of ecosystems that haunt her through her works find an echo in more intimate catastrophes while the window to the world changes perspective. For centuries, painters framed landscapes and geometric minds celebrated the victory of the straight line, and thus of conquering reason over Nature. Now, it is we who are kept behind bars which no longer frame the world at an attempt to order it– both by tidying it up and by giving it demands– but condemn us to a prison that we have constructed for ourselves. We stare at a limited horizon, we lament our captured future. The bars singe with their immobile leaves frozen in an eternal autumn, and pick us up with a paradoxical hospitality: you who enter, leave all hope...
We dreamt of embracing the infinite, to fulfil our dreams freely, voraciously, and here we are docking on the shores of the bitter land. Nature– which, according to the ancients, liked to hide– comes back to the forefront under other names and other forms reminding us of her fierce adversity with these glittering barb wires. In our empty skies, the idea of divine punishment resonates like an old antenna in the air. The tale of a rebellious nature dominated by the modern man emerges from environmental catastrophes, beating man’s technicist pride into the ground to put him in his rightful place. Yet, he still seems too deaf to this calling.
Will this barred window open to a new iron age? Lulù Nuti models immemorial materials, earth elements, and welcomes a balance. Copper, traditionally associated to Venus and the feminine, and thus fertility, aides the growth of the plants. Yet, in quantities too large, it harms their vitality. All these circuits of interdependence, when we listen to the, whisper to us to be careful with the eurhythmics of the world, so easy to throw out of harmony.
Iron age, perhaps, but also an age of undoing: the prison, beyond its gates, is transmuted into liberation for Lulù Nuti, leading to introspection. After having built reassuring structures of concepts where the artist, too, liked to hide, Lulù Nuti strips off to go to the assault of her inner self. Her concrete cubes seizing the world were already serrated with cracks, nevertheless contained, resulting from hazardous but wanted deflagrations. But what happens when the implosion is in itself, when the inner shaking becomes a tectonic shock?
The landscapes become the receptacles of the world’s hostility and its long disdainful dangers. The mountains– here red and blue, primary like their bitter colours– are drawn by some diffused lines to define the impossible. Matter and memory join forces in the diffused charcoal dusting. The crystallise memories– the last voyage– in fragments, and the proof is that of impression and pain. The peaks neighbour the chasms like the two faces of life. Death prowls around, sketched with the fingertips, without ostentation or voyeurism, because the display of grief does not make its shadow recede. The word grief seems more accurate than the overly psychoanalytical word mourning, as Barthes wrote in his Journal. In this grief, we find the echo in the mountain that folds iron, that twists it as pain can contort the stomach. These concentric arcs recall the circles in water formed when a child throws a stone in it and thus becomes aware of itself by noticing its action on the world. The movements of the soul are externalised in this silent cry which modulates matter. In their reverberation, they seek to retain the ghosts.
Yet, Lulù Nuti resists the elegiac temptation: not the abdication within her, but the possibility of new arrangements– we can move mountains. Like the titles of these exhibitions with various meanings, these works are subject to re-composition. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed, she also seems to declare when we leaf through Autoproduction, a small publication with secret perfumes where photographs of works produced by the artist are superimposed on those of family jewels deposited in banks. We enter the bitter land of the condition of the artist, the underside of her art, but this disrobing finds an unravelling without drama: the jewels, here consigned, allow for other treasures.
The work is constantly weaving the singular and the universal, the personal and the impersonal, the past and the present, and it is in its ellipses, in its gaps that the spectators and their personal histories can slip in. What good are artists in these catastrophic times? Against the injunction to immediate resilience and false smiles, the artist gracefully invites to a sharing of the pain. Her works ricochet like challenges to despair, assuming the negative, the white, the silence, and the play of purity and lines. In her wake, one can then smell the bittersweet fragrances. »
Because Lulù Nuti modestly invites us to enter the bitter land of memory. The collapsing of ecosystems that haunt her through her works find an echo in more intimate catastrophes while the window to the world changes perspective. For centuries, painters framed landscapes and geometric minds celebrated the victory of the straight line, and thus of conquering reason over Nature. Now, it is we who are kept behind bars which no longer frame the world at an attempt to order it– both by tidying it up and by giving it demands– but condemn us to a prison that we have constructed for ourselves. We stare at a limited horizon, we lament our captured future. The bars singe with their immobile leaves frozen in an eternal autumn, and pick us up with a paradoxical hospitality: you who enter, leave all hope...
We dreamt of embracing the infinite, to fulfil our dreams freely, voraciously, and here we are docking on the shores of the bitter land. Nature– which, according to the ancients, liked to hide– comes back to the forefront under other names and other forms reminding us of her fierce adversity with these glittering barb wires. In our empty skies, the idea of divine punishment resonates like an old antenna in the air. The tale of a rebellious nature dominated by the modern man emerges from environmental catastrophes, beating man’s technicist pride into the ground to put him in his rightful place. Yet, he still seems too deaf to this calling.
Will this barred window open to a new iron age? Lulù Nuti models immemorial materials, earth elements, and welcomes a balance. Copper, traditionally associated to Venus and the feminine, and thus fertility, aides the growth of the plants. Yet, in quantities too large, it harms their vitality. All these circuits of interdependence, when we listen to the, whisper to us to be careful with the eurhythmics of the world, so easy to throw out of harmony.
Iron age, perhaps, but also an age of undoing: the prison, beyond its gates, is transmuted into liberation for Lulù Nuti, leading to introspection. After having built reassuring structures of concepts where the artist, too, liked to hide, Lulù Nuti strips off to go to the assault of her inner self. Her concrete cubes seizing the world were already serrated with cracks, nevertheless contained, resulting from hazardous but wanted deflagrations. But what happens when the implosion is in itself, when the inner shaking becomes a tectonic shock?
The landscapes become the receptacles of the world’s hostility and its long disdainful dangers. The mountains– here red and blue, primary like their bitter colours– are drawn by some diffused lines to define the impossible. Matter and memory join forces in the diffused charcoal dusting. The crystallise memories– the last voyage– in fragments, and the proof is that of impression and pain. The peaks neighbour the chasms like the two faces of life. Death prowls around, sketched with the fingertips, without ostentation or voyeurism, because the display of grief does not make its shadow recede. The word grief seems more accurate than the overly psychoanalytical word mourning, as Barthes wrote in his Journal. In this grief, we find the echo in the mountain that folds iron, that twists it as pain can contort the stomach. These concentric arcs recall the circles in water formed when a child throws a stone in it and thus becomes aware of itself by noticing its action on the world. The movements of the soul are externalised in this silent cry which modulates matter. In their reverberation, they seek to retain the ghosts.
Yet, Lulù Nuti resists the elegiac temptation: not the abdication within her, but the possibility of new arrangements– we can move mountains. Like the titles of these exhibitions with various meanings, these works are subject to re-composition. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed, she also seems to declare when we leaf through Autoproduction, a small publication with secret perfumes where photographs of works produced by the artist are superimposed on those of family jewels deposited in banks. We enter the bitter land of the condition of the artist, the underside of her art, but this disrobing finds an unravelling without drama: the jewels, here consigned, allow for other treasures.
The work is constantly weaving the singular and the universal, the personal and the impersonal, the past and the present, and it is in its ellipses, in its gaps that the spectators and their personal histories can slip in. What good are artists in these catastrophic times? Against the injunction to immediate resilience and false smiles, the artist gracefully invites to a sharing of the pain. Her works ricochet like challenges to despair, assuming the negative, the white, the silence, and the play of purity and lines. In her wake, one can then smell the bittersweet fragrances. »
YSÉ SOREL
Terrain Amère, GALERIE CHLOE SALGADO, PARIS, 2021
Terrain Amère, GALERIE CHLOE SALGADO, PARIS, 2021
Without mythology, how can we solve the mysteries of existence? This question was posed by Aby Warburg when giving a talk to an audience of doctors and patients of a mental institution - the same hospital where he was a patient. Warburg put together this conference to demonstrate his own mental sanity. The talk itself was a result of a study he had carried out years before and that, in his own words, looked like “a horrid convulsion of a decapitated frog”.
The focus of his mental frenzy was, of course, the question of “Myth”, not in terms of the past, but rather in an absolute (or potentially future) point of view: beyond technology, beyond anthropocene. To condense his vast anthropological disquisition on the topic, we have myth put on a par with a maker of iconology: not exclusively an answer to unknown natural phenomena, not necessarily an answer to people´s religious and spiritual needs. Rather, we take the myth as a symbol of a space devoted to the union between what is earthly and what is immaterial: a union that distanced itself in the eternal race between man and world - a race with a tragic and egalitarian finish line, namely the end of everything.
Here we are in the crucial moment of the “after all”. Here we are enveloped in a new atmosphere, less conceivable than the Mesozoic era. Here we stay, we pause, we press II.
The title of the duo show of Lulú Nuti and Alessandro Gianní, deliberately doesn´t make use of any words, rather uses a symbol. In an area suspended between a before and an after, we are brought to fantasize about a non-verbal existence, where rules are made by primitive sensations of shock and dismay. We are in a theatrical interlude, between two acts. We experience the void of something that was there a second before, and now is only a vague presence in our memory, something existing as a blurred, dissolved, chaotic image, sort of like Warburg´s frog. In this dimension the only things present are images acting as a viaticum of memory. Here, images work as lights to guide our way in a new aesthetic, a new formula of reason and logos. We can therefore hypothesize a sensation of suspension, of absence of gravity. For now though, we keep our feet well grounded in order to walk through the exhibition and the works: we are in a place where the sun doesn´t set anymore because it died, together with planet Earth and the whole solar system. What´s left are molds and casts of foregone material practices, burnt figures from an undefined era, ruins of a distant future. The works in the show seem to tell about this interlude, a moment in which mankind can lose everything aside from what is essential. In this case, the Essential is the image and the surprised gaze that lays on it.
Indeed, the first instruments that complete Nuti´s first work in the show are the eyes. Entering the exhibition, the view is partially covered by a wooden structure on which a bronze cast of a beehive is placed. Peeping through the holes of the beehive, we are able to see beyond the wooden structure. The bronze beehive can be seen as fossil matter of our world, perhaps ultimately a sign of passing.
Figures survive, blurred and liquefied in a chaotic memory. We can recognize some fragments of faces in the paintings of Gianní: a man, a woman, a baby perhaps. Sometimes spheres partially emerge throughout the paintings and chromed ceramics. Mankind is out of this world and seems to play with it, perhaps by summoning humans in somewhat of an arcane ritual. The work looks at humanity from the outside and from far away in time and space.
Soon into the exhibition, the observer finds himself looking at a planetary scenario from an external perspective. Nuti´s sculptural installation invites the visitor to lay down on a bed and to observe its headboard: a sculptural mass that reproduces the solar system, only void of any globes and distinctive shapes. In the second floor piece instead, the world is fragmented, scattered like an archipelago.
The geometric texture of the wall hosts Gianní´s paintings and Nuti´s planetary horizon, like visions tangled in the mesh of a grid. Like a map, with its potentially infinite meridians and parallels, the grid plays in response to the geometric motif of the tilework, a distinctive trait of this space.
The intention to retain a same ambiguous visual flow throughout the exhibition is evident in the collaborative piece, which summarizes the whole process developed by the two artists in dialogue with each other. A lithograph by Gianní, framed within two of Nuti´s vertical horizons, embodies the pause, the hiatus of the title as if it were a fragment of time captured between two parentheses: the same interlude without which a theatrical plot cannot unfold and without which mankind can´t create its own future mythology.
The focus of his mental frenzy was, of course, the question of “Myth”, not in terms of the past, but rather in an absolute (or potentially future) point of view: beyond technology, beyond anthropocene. To condense his vast anthropological disquisition on the topic, we have myth put on a par with a maker of iconology: not exclusively an answer to unknown natural phenomena, not necessarily an answer to people´s religious and spiritual needs. Rather, we take the myth as a symbol of a space devoted to the union between what is earthly and what is immaterial: a union that distanced itself in the eternal race between man and world - a race with a tragic and egalitarian finish line, namely the end of everything.
Here we are in the crucial moment of the “after all”. Here we are enveloped in a new atmosphere, less conceivable than the Mesozoic era. Here we stay, we pause, we press II.
The title of the duo show of Lulú Nuti and Alessandro Gianní, deliberately doesn´t make use of any words, rather uses a symbol. In an area suspended between a before and an after, we are brought to fantasize about a non-verbal existence, where rules are made by primitive sensations of shock and dismay. We are in a theatrical interlude, between two acts. We experience the void of something that was there a second before, and now is only a vague presence in our memory, something existing as a blurred, dissolved, chaotic image, sort of like Warburg´s frog. In this dimension the only things present are images acting as a viaticum of memory. Here, images work as lights to guide our way in a new aesthetic, a new formula of reason and logos. We can therefore hypothesize a sensation of suspension, of absence of gravity. For now though, we keep our feet well grounded in order to walk through the exhibition and the works: we are in a place where the sun doesn´t set anymore because it died, together with planet Earth and the whole solar system. What´s left are molds and casts of foregone material practices, burnt figures from an undefined era, ruins of a distant future. The works in the show seem to tell about this interlude, a moment in which mankind can lose everything aside from what is essential. In this case, the Essential is the image and the surprised gaze that lays on it.
Indeed, the first instruments that complete Nuti´s first work in the show are the eyes. Entering the exhibition, the view is partially covered by a wooden structure on which a bronze cast of a beehive is placed. Peeping through the holes of the beehive, we are able to see beyond the wooden structure. The bronze beehive can be seen as fossil matter of our world, perhaps ultimately a sign of passing.
Figures survive, blurred and liquefied in a chaotic memory. We can recognize some fragments of faces in the paintings of Gianní: a man, a woman, a baby perhaps. Sometimes spheres partially emerge throughout the paintings and chromed ceramics. Mankind is out of this world and seems to play with it, perhaps by summoning humans in somewhat of an arcane ritual. The work looks at humanity from the outside and from far away in time and space.
Soon into the exhibition, the observer finds himself looking at a planetary scenario from an external perspective. Nuti´s sculptural installation invites the visitor to lay down on a bed and to observe its headboard: a sculptural mass that reproduces the solar system, only void of any globes and distinctive shapes. In the second floor piece instead, the world is fragmented, scattered like an archipelago.
The geometric texture of the wall hosts Gianní´s paintings and Nuti´s planetary horizon, like visions tangled in the mesh of a grid. Like a map, with its potentially infinite meridians and parallels, the grid plays in response to the geometric motif of the tilework, a distinctive trait of this space.
The intention to retain a same ambiguous visual flow throughout the exhibition is evident in the collaborative piece, which summarizes the whole process developed by the two artists in dialogue with each other. A lithograph by Gianní, framed within two of Nuti´s vertical horizons, embodies the pause, the hiatus of the title as if it were a fragment of time captured between two parentheses: the same interlude without which a theatrical plot cannot unfold and without which mankind can´t create its own future mythology.
GIULIANA BENASSI
Interlude. For a mythology of the future
II, Alessandro Gianni and Lulù Nuti, SPAZIO MENSA, Rome, 2021
Interlude. For a mythology of the future
II, Alessandro Gianni and Lulù Nuti, SPAZIO MENSA, Rome, 2021
So it goes is composed of a series of sculptures. It is a site-specific installation that reflects on the perception of time, starting from the artist’s personal thoughts in measuring herself against her own life span. Nuti was born and raised in Campo de’ Fiori and spent most of her childhood in the main streets of the neighborhood. This led the artist to conceive of a work that stemmed from her personal childhood memories of the area, including the Bar Farnese. The encounter with a past temporal dimension broke the artist’s linear perception by which the present is a preamble to the future and the past is "cancelled", thus creating a parabolic inversion that brought the past back to weigh in on current decisions. This epiphany arose from the physical encounter with the setting and led the artist to poetically translate a conflict that belongs to all human beings when perceiving time, stretched between Newton’s and Einstein’s theories in terms of relativity. The artist finds similar deliberations in the novel "Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death" (Kurt Vonnegut, 1969) – from which Nuti takes the title for her installation. “So it goes” is the motto of an extraterrestrial civilization appropriated by the protagonist to face the traumas that afflict him. The heart of the installation is composed of the artist's kinetic toys from when she was a child, hidden and covered with building materials which effectively prevent their normal movements and metaphorically act as a burden that influences and slows down current time. As if caged in piles of condensed dust, these items from the past take on new forms and functions.
GIULIANA BENASSI
MIRABILIA URBIS, Catalogue, ed. VIAINDUSTRIAE, 2019
MIRABILIA URBIS, Catalogue, ed. VIAINDUSTRIAE, 2019
« Brought up by the first images of Earth seen from space taken by NASA in 1972 and the successive discoveries of so-called livable planets, Lulù Nuti took note of the Copernican revolution operating at the time the famous Blue Marble Shot was published. Cradled by the blockbuster films starring images of an exploding Earth, she wondered about future habitable places. Who are the colonizers of the universe ? How do astronauts go about exploring the world ? She provides them with portable matrices from our planet Earth to take to Mars and Pluto, like souvenirs or models. This gesture, poetic and absurd, is illusory and more like an intellectual speculation rather than a pragmatic solution.
Child of the Chernobyl generation, Lulù has been intimately marked by the disasters of the end of the century : nuclear accidents, the AIDS epidemic, global warming and the migration crisis. While the phenomena that she witnesses transcend borders and are intrinsically international, she questions how to define their forms and limits. From which follows a reflection on contamination, propagation and its consequences : cartography.
Lulù Nuti indisputably represents the everchanging moment in which we find ourselves. Inscribing herself in Anthropocene, she announces disaster– the end of the favorable influence of a star– the downside, a reversal that surpasses and upsets us. The artist is like a firefly which Pasolini laments the disappearance in L’articolo delle luciole. The Italian filmmaker stated, « In the beginning of the 1960s, due to air pollution and, especially in the countryside, water pollution (azure flowers and clear canals), fireflies began to disappear (L’article des lucioles, Écrits corsaires, Paris, Flammarion, 1976, ed. 2005, p. 180-189). »
Yet, they survive, and serve as the light to follow, as described by Georges Didi-Huberman. These dim lights are our guides in case of ecological danger or political dictatorship (Survivance des lucioles, 2009, Les Éditions de Minuit, p. 44-50) : « The glow, or “glimmers of hope”, disappear with innocence condemned to death (...) it is not the fireflies that were destroyed, but rather something central in the desire to see, in desire in general, thus in the political hope of Pasolini. » He stated that « the experience is indestructible, even if it is reduced to the survival and secrecies of mere glimmers in the night (p. 128). »
Lulù is the glimmer in the darkness. She proposes intermittent and fragile images, full of duality between presence and erasure, balance and fragility. For Didi-Huberman, the « “firefly-image” can be seen not only as testimonies but also as prophecies, predictions about political history in the making (p. 119). » This is also the case for Lulù, for whom art is a tool for awakening and representing the consequences of our actions in our environment. Her work is both her visual manifesto and her means of action. In the face of disaster, the artist proposes a new alignment of the stars, that she molds, classifies and ranks. Although the artist and her work may be full of awareness of danger and our responsibility for the consequences (the series is entitled Beyond our control), she avoids an apocalyptic tone and promises no resurrection. She creates objects that gracefully freeze « a form of infinity crystallized in an instant to endure the infinite. » In her work, survival is understood as a means of resistance. »
Child of the Chernobyl generation, Lulù has been intimately marked by the disasters of the end of the century : nuclear accidents, the AIDS epidemic, global warming and the migration crisis. While the phenomena that she witnesses transcend borders and are intrinsically international, she questions how to define their forms and limits. From which follows a reflection on contamination, propagation and its consequences : cartography.
Lulù Nuti indisputably represents the everchanging moment in which we find ourselves. Inscribing herself in Anthropocene, she announces disaster– the end of the favorable influence of a star– the downside, a reversal that surpasses and upsets us. The artist is like a firefly which Pasolini laments the disappearance in L’articolo delle luciole. The Italian filmmaker stated, « In the beginning of the 1960s, due to air pollution and, especially in the countryside, water pollution (azure flowers and clear canals), fireflies began to disappear (L’article des lucioles, Écrits corsaires, Paris, Flammarion, 1976, ed. 2005, p. 180-189). »
Yet, they survive, and serve as the light to follow, as described by Georges Didi-Huberman. These dim lights are our guides in case of ecological danger or political dictatorship (Survivance des lucioles, 2009, Les Éditions de Minuit, p. 44-50) : « The glow, or “glimmers of hope”, disappear with innocence condemned to death (...) it is not the fireflies that were destroyed, but rather something central in the desire to see, in desire in general, thus in the political hope of Pasolini. » He stated that « the experience is indestructible, even if it is reduced to the survival and secrecies of mere glimmers in the night (p. 128). »
Lulù is the glimmer in the darkness. She proposes intermittent and fragile images, full of duality between presence and erasure, balance and fragility. For Didi-Huberman, the « “firefly-image” can be seen not only as testimonies but also as prophecies, predictions about political history in the making (p. 119). » This is also the case for Lulù, for whom art is a tool for awakening and representing the consequences of our actions in our environment. Her work is both her visual manifesto and her means of action. In the face of disaster, the artist proposes a new alignment of the stars, that she molds, classifies and ranks. Although the artist and her work may be full of awareness of danger and our responsibility for the consequences (the series is entitled Beyond our control), she avoids an apocalyptic tone and promises no resurrection. She creates objects that gracefully freeze « a form of infinity crystallized in an instant to endure the infinite. » In her work, survival is understood as a means of resistance. »
JEANNE BARRAL
Calcare Il Mondo, GALERIE CHLOE SALGADO, 2018
Calcare Il Mondo, GALERIE CHLOE SALGADO, 2018