1 2 3
Smile. What face do we allow ourselves to reveal to the other in this millimetered space-time of the retinal trigger? What does that tense expression, piercing gaze, pinched lips, or sharp smile inspire in us? “Tube” is a series of faceless but not moodless sculptures. These latest works by artist Lulù Nuti for her eponymous exhibition at GALERIE CHLOE SALGADO have the particularity of being variations of the same iron round bar. Nuti chooses an industrial material as the initial matrix to better explore the multitude of stories this evolving form has to tell us—or keep silent. The Shy One greets us, withdrawing into itself, yet unable to fully conceal the sharp point rising at its center. It introduces the dual tension that underlies the entire body of work and the exhibition. Frozen in a spiraling gesture, it draws us into its movement as much as it repels us. Devoid of a base, the Tubes extend into space, finding support as much on the ground as on the walls, emphasizing a sense of choreographed momentum. This dance begins from the very inception of the work, in its germinal state. The artist narrates the forms, mimicking the energy of each sculpture. Like a mold or its counterform, her body becomes the preliminary medium of the piece. By sketching the metal’s movements in space, she communicates the intentions of the form to Jadran Stenico, the blacksmith she has collaborated with since 2017 to create her wrought iron pieces. This gestural and sensitive creation process becomes a language in itself, introducing a fundamental approach that engages the discursive qualities embedded in every material.
In Lulù Nuti’s work, one can detect a continuity with certain post-minimalist and Anti-form principles, which suggest that material takes shape through its inherent qualities and the distinctive marks that time and workshop treatments have left on its surface. Her plastic vocabulary, stripped of representations, primarily seeks a mode of expressiveness affected by gesture, wear, and tension, which imprints itself in the memory of the material. The layers of its history are revealed primarily through the coexistence, in a single piece, of different states of the material. Sometimes left raw from machining, the ends and faces of the pieces are worked in distinctive ways—sculpted, forged, polished. Nuti thus treats her tubes in all the dimensions that the material, volume, and spatial arrangement allow.
1 2 3
Green light. Orange light. Red light. They strike a pose. Lulù Nuti’s sculptures have the power of forms in full potency. Supple bodies that leap forward in a movement captured as the expression of a character, whose head and tail suggest a zoomorphic form that guides the reading of the gesture. These two extremities of the tube, however, represent neither beginning nor end. Like the worm with its morphological peculiarity where front and back blur, its vital movement is both linear—forward— and expansive—around. Its entire skin breathes. The two forms characterizing the ends of these tubular bodies—a point and a membrane—could just as easily represent two simultaneous states, in action or potential, of this tubular life. One active state of aiming, penetration, extraction, elongation, or even attack; and another of modesty, in a gesture of epidermal expansion, covering, flexibility, and preservation. The ambiguity enabled by these ambivalences is a modus operandi for Lulù Nuti, who continuously explores the dialectic between saying and doing, idea and gesture, appearance and being. The moods inhabiting the exhibition space—shy, elusive, secretive, fearful, observing—stem from this dual relationship that characterizes an equivocal mode of being and being in relation to the other. The Tubes, it seems, play sentry, simultaneously desiring and repelling an attraction point that guides us through the exhibition space. They occupy ambivalent positions and attitudes, oscillating between defense and offense. While the Fearful One hides against the wall, the Watcher peers through its hammered surface. Intentions remain masked, and the modesty at work blends with an attempt at camouflage. Nothing is revealed at a single glance. Thus, curiosity and desire are aroused, making the art of unveiling operative.
By constantly eluding us, the Tubes force us to join the dance, to move in order to shift perspectives, alter centers, and multiply viewing angles in a contrary pursuit of revelation that strives to grasp an immediate and intelligible unity. Inevitably failing to contain the integrity of the piece, we are confronted with the impossibility of seeing two things at once, activating an awareness of the potential for a multitude in power. Nuti thus works to bring forth the vital energy residing in the hidden potential of all things without corrupting it. To do this, she nurtures a relationship of doubt with the object, prompting movements of reversal and back-and-forth through games of rupture, dissonance, or exhaustion of the material and its forms. Despite the seemingly brutal nature of wrought iron, this approach, pushed to its limits, seeks finesse and flexibility, and does not exclude a form of sensuality.
1 2 3
Rock, Paper, Scissors. The importance of gesture. Three smaller wall sculptures occupy a special place in the exhibition. Still made from the same initial module, the tube in this case stretches to form a hand. Like an amputated limb, the other end is a rough cut, revealing not the hollow but the solid interior of the iron section. The hand-shape varies according to three potentials: closed, open, folded. Contrasting with the methodical rigor to which the artist remains faithful, the quest for movement that she brings to life in her forms, as we have seen, draws on modes of play, defiance, and even risk. The game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, in its confrontation with the opponent, is a form of calculated chance. The choice of gesture is voluntary but limited and will be dictated by the mutual experience of the two players. This game is among the most archaic, having traversed civilizations, often used to "draw lots," make decisions, or settle situations by relying on the gods or simply fate. The completion of a gesture has the potential to alter the course of things. The presence of these three anatomical ex-votos in the exhibition clarifies the materialistic approach that infuses Nuti's work, asserting both the energetic and affective charge incorporated into the object and the fundamental role of the hand’s relationship with the material. This is particularly significant in all artisanal practices, but even more so for the blacksmith, whose technique originally stems from the art of toolmaking. The hand, the tool, and the form merge, symbolizing, by metonymy, the continuity and reciprocity of agency between technique and material, gesture and form. While the three pieces unequivocally illustrate popular playful practices of games and wagers, their representation as fragmentary limbs also invokes their symbolic and emotional functions, akin to popular votive practices.
Nuti more explicitly reveals the signs and images that inform her research without showing them in the more abstract forms that usually constitute her plastic vocabulary. The Tubes thus carry a denser, more complex significance. In these elongated beasts, new metaphorical intentions emerge. Some of the sculptures twist, folding back onto themselves until they penetrate one another. Here, the Ouroboros motif—the serpent biting its tail—becomes a central figure in the exhibition. While this symbol is often associated with protective and regenerative qualities, the physiological phenomenon of autophagy, observed in snakes and linked to this image, arises from a lethal survival mechanism. When exposed to excessive heat, they devour themselves in a final attempt at regulation. The serpent or worm also refers to the massive drill head used to bore tunnels through mountains. During a residency at a drilling site, Lulù Nuti experienced this steel worm devouring rock with a shrill sound, regurgitating the mountain's innards as a viscous magma. In response to the invader, the mountain overheats, protecting itself in turn. From autophagy to geological fever, and through to molten iron shaped by the hammer, the drive for creation and preservation of life becomes a conversation with fire.
Smile. What face do we allow ourselves to reveal to the other in this millimetered space-time of the retinal trigger? What does that tense expression, piercing gaze, pinched lips, or sharp smile inspire in us? “Tube” is a series of faceless but not moodless sculptures. These latest works by artist Lulù Nuti for her eponymous exhibition at GALERIE CHLOE SALGADO have the particularity of being variations of the same iron round bar. Nuti chooses an industrial material as the initial matrix to better explore the multitude of stories this evolving form has to tell us—or keep silent. The Shy One greets us, withdrawing into itself, yet unable to fully conceal the sharp point rising at its center. It introduces the dual tension that underlies the entire body of work and the exhibition. Frozen in a spiraling gesture, it draws us into its movement as much as it repels us. Devoid of a base, the Tubes extend into space, finding support as much on the ground as on the walls, emphasizing a sense of choreographed momentum. This dance begins from the very inception of the work, in its germinal state. The artist narrates the forms, mimicking the energy of each sculpture. Like a mold or its counterform, her body becomes the preliminary medium of the piece. By sketching the metal’s movements in space, she communicates the intentions of the form to Jadran Stenico, the blacksmith she has collaborated with since 2017 to create her wrought iron pieces. This gestural and sensitive creation process becomes a language in itself, introducing a fundamental approach that engages the discursive qualities embedded in every material.
In Lulù Nuti’s work, one can detect a continuity with certain post-minimalist and Anti-form principles, which suggest that material takes shape through its inherent qualities and the distinctive marks that time and workshop treatments have left on its surface. Her plastic vocabulary, stripped of representations, primarily seeks a mode of expressiveness affected by gesture, wear, and tension, which imprints itself in the memory of the material. The layers of its history are revealed primarily through the coexistence, in a single piece, of different states of the material. Sometimes left raw from machining, the ends and faces of the pieces are worked in distinctive ways—sculpted, forged, polished. Nuti thus treats her tubes in all the dimensions that the material, volume, and spatial arrangement allow.
1 2 3
Green light. Orange light. Red light. They strike a pose. Lulù Nuti’s sculptures have the power of forms in full potency. Supple bodies that leap forward in a movement captured as the expression of a character, whose head and tail suggest a zoomorphic form that guides the reading of the gesture. These two extremities of the tube, however, represent neither beginning nor end. Like the worm with its morphological peculiarity where front and back blur, its vital movement is both linear—forward— and expansive—around. Its entire skin breathes. The two forms characterizing the ends of these tubular bodies—a point and a membrane—could just as easily represent two simultaneous states, in action or potential, of this tubular life. One active state of aiming, penetration, extraction, elongation, or even attack; and another of modesty, in a gesture of epidermal expansion, covering, flexibility, and preservation. The ambiguity enabled by these ambivalences is a modus operandi for Lulù Nuti, who continuously explores the dialectic between saying and doing, idea and gesture, appearance and being. The moods inhabiting the exhibition space—shy, elusive, secretive, fearful, observing—stem from this dual relationship that characterizes an equivocal mode of being and being in relation to the other. The Tubes, it seems, play sentry, simultaneously desiring and repelling an attraction point that guides us through the exhibition space. They occupy ambivalent positions and attitudes, oscillating between defense and offense. While the Fearful One hides against the wall, the Watcher peers through its hammered surface. Intentions remain masked, and the modesty at work blends with an attempt at camouflage. Nothing is revealed at a single glance. Thus, curiosity and desire are aroused, making the art of unveiling operative.
By constantly eluding us, the Tubes force us to join the dance, to move in order to shift perspectives, alter centers, and multiply viewing angles in a contrary pursuit of revelation that strives to grasp an immediate and intelligible unity. Inevitably failing to contain the integrity of the piece, we are confronted with the impossibility of seeing two things at once, activating an awareness of the potential for a multitude in power. Nuti thus works to bring forth the vital energy residing in the hidden potential of all things without corrupting it. To do this, she nurtures a relationship of doubt with the object, prompting movements of reversal and back-and-forth through games of rupture, dissonance, or exhaustion of the material and its forms. Despite the seemingly brutal nature of wrought iron, this approach, pushed to its limits, seeks finesse and flexibility, and does not exclude a form of sensuality.
1 2 3
Rock, Paper, Scissors. The importance of gesture. Three smaller wall sculptures occupy a special place in the exhibition. Still made from the same initial module, the tube in this case stretches to form a hand. Like an amputated limb, the other end is a rough cut, revealing not the hollow but the solid interior of the iron section. The hand-shape varies according to three potentials: closed, open, folded. Contrasting with the methodical rigor to which the artist remains faithful, the quest for movement that she brings to life in her forms, as we have seen, draws on modes of play, defiance, and even risk. The game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, in its confrontation with the opponent, is a form of calculated chance. The choice of gesture is voluntary but limited and will be dictated by the mutual experience of the two players. This game is among the most archaic, having traversed civilizations, often used to "draw lots," make decisions, or settle situations by relying on the gods or simply fate. The completion of a gesture has the potential to alter the course of things. The presence of these three anatomical ex-votos in the exhibition clarifies the materialistic approach that infuses Nuti's work, asserting both the energetic and affective charge incorporated into the object and the fundamental role of the hand’s relationship with the material. This is particularly significant in all artisanal practices, but even more so for the blacksmith, whose technique originally stems from the art of toolmaking. The hand, the tool, and the form merge, symbolizing, by metonymy, the continuity and reciprocity of agency between technique and material, gesture and form. While the three pieces unequivocally illustrate popular playful practices of games and wagers, their representation as fragmentary limbs also invokes their symbolic and emotional functions, akin to popular votive practices.
Nuti more explicitly reveals the signs and images that inform her research without showing them in the more abstract forms that usually constitute her plastic vocabulary. The Tubes thus carry a denser, more complex significance. In these elongated beasts, new metaphorical intentions emerge. Some of the sculptures twist, folding back onto themselves until they penetrate one another. Here, the Ouroboros motif—the serpent biting its tail—becomes a central figure in the exhibition. While this symbol is often associated with protective and regenerative qualities, the physiological phenomenon of autophagy, observed in snakes and linked to this image, arises from a lethal survival mechanism. When exposed to excessive heat, they devour themselves in a final attempt at regulation. The serpent or worm also refers to the massive drill head used to bore tunnels through mountains. During a residency at a drilling site, Lulù Nuti experienced this steel worm devouring rock with a shrill sound, regurgitating the mountain's innards as a viscous magma. In response to the invader, the mountain overheats, protecting itself in turn. From autophagy to geological fever, and through to molten iron shaped by the hammer, the drive for creation and preservation of life becomes a conversation with fire.
NOÉMIE PACAUD
TUBE, GALERIE CHLOE SALGADO, PARIS, 2024
TUBE, GALERIE CHLOE SALGADO, PARIS, 2024
« 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