Carapelli supports the award as a contribution to culture: artists are precious for our society and our life, from them come the visions that allow us to consider the world in an ever new way. They are themselves the roots, steadfast in the present and looking towards the future. Carapelli for Art thanks all the artists for the extraordinary participation received this year: 1.720 applications from 80 countries around the world.
The theme of the third edition: Roots.
The roots keep us firm on the ground, to make us grow in height; they are our identity, history, tradition - individually and collectively. They make any form of exchange possible because their strength is inclusive. This is in their principle: they give us nourishment and stability, to allow development and transformation. In art, the roots are essential: they can be the relationship with one's origin, the recurring character of a research, the solid link with a material or an idea, the first and necessary element of a process.
CATEGORIA OPEN
Vincitori
Arturas Bumšteinas
Navigations
(2019, sound-art performance, macchine barocche in legno in teatro barocco, sistema audio DIY)
Performance presented in a large museum space (the National Art Gallery of Vilnius) with an ensemble of five artists navigating the wheel-mounted Baroque atmospheric noise machines, while the public observes this meteorological theatre from several fixed locations. Navigations is an installation that emerges from an intersection between art, music, and theatre. It refers to the stage machines of the Baroque period, suitable for simulating a storm on stage. In the performative action, actualized, the same machines are exhibited, and the imaginative process is reversed: the origin of a narrative effect becomes narration, while the observer, or listener, evokes in himself the rest of a possible representation. In accordance with the simple ingenuity of the ancient instruments, the work retains an evident sculptural value, fully responding to the concept of "root" introduced this year by Carapelli for Art, if one thinks of the concatenation process that the roots underlie, in their formation as in their becoming. Drawing on the maritime imaginary of current significance but depriving it of any obvious reference to the present, the artist makes it the object of a contemporary condition that unites us by managing to tell precisely that unequal struggle that man has continued to fight for centuries to dominate the sea: sailing as a desire to be rooted but at the same time a projection. “Navigations” is a further development of the "Bad Weather" project. Concept & direction by Arturas Bumšteinas. Performed by Gailė Griciūtė, Greta Grinevičiūtė, Alanas Gurinas, Gitis Bertulis, Aaron Kahn.
Concept & direction by Arturas Bumšteinas. In collaboration with Ernestas Volodzka, Kala sound system and Operomanija. Performed by Gailė Griciūtė, Greta Grinevičiūtė, Alanas Gurinas, Gitis Bertulis, Aaron Kahn. (Photos by Martynas Aleksa)
Sergia Avveduti
Freccia Esplosa
(2020, legno di noce, 70x61x78cm – laser print su acciaio, 20x24 cm)
An ancient clock mechanism emerges as a root to two constellations. It is a plane obtained by reworking the shape of an enlarged clock mechanism, the body rests on three legs one of which is flexed and grafted onto a double almond, a symbol of transcendence and origin, almost a spear towards infinity and communication between physical and immaterial dimension. I imagined the mechanism as a vector, an exploded arrow crossing the uncertain as the essence of the human condition. The work expresses a great ability to transfigure traditional elements - both material and conceptual - into a fascinating and mysterious narrative; the exploded arrow is a vector that indicates the breaking of time, from a starting point to a final one that in a certain way coincide (the origin of creation, the explosion - pure root - is perhaps also the result of a very distant future). The sculptural work, in its apparent instability, deconstruction and re-assembly of a clock mechanism, relates to the uncertainty of the human condition. For years, a punctual and experimental sculptress, Sergia Avveduti carries out a unique and important work in the current Italian art scene for the consistency of a constantly evolving formal research. By continually updating sign and form, questioning the origin of their deposition, the artist becomes heir to an art history that does not invent but transforms, interprets, and translates. His gaze tirelessly moves from a landscape that is nature and artifice, to the work and vice versa, constantly updating its meaning.
CATEGORIA ACCADEMIA
Vincitori
Carlos Casuso
X-About credit and debt
(2020, Oil on linen canvas, rabbit glue and chalk, tempera sketch, 150x150cm)
The painting moves between a meta-pictorial value and the attempt to destroy it. The image speaks of the History of Painting, this is reflected in the techniques used (you can see the use of hatching typical of tempera painting, as well as pointillism, gestural painting together with comics) and on the materials used. The work comes from the study of paintings, depicting the theme "Deposition" performed between the beginning of the eleventh century and the end of the fourteenth century. From this base, I continued for logical formal / chromatic, accidental links. Work awarded for the way in which the artist tackles the roots of painting practice starting from the relationship of man with technique. The “deposition” proposed by Casuso welcomes different expressions, gestures, and backgrounds in a surprisingly plausible composition. All collected in a mixed but neat technique of watercolour, tempera, and oil painting. As if the artist wanted to retrace different approaches of man with the painted image, bringing out a common reservoir for Western painting by keeping together signs ranging from the Middle Ages to comics to the story of the present. If on the one hand Casuso's work is innervated on a poetics of the fragment that attributes an aura of memory to the work, on the other hand, jumping between techniques, colors and references, it gives life to a dynamic interweaving between past and present.
Silvia Bertoldo
Funambolo
(2020, wax sculpture)
Roots between proxemics and mycorrhizae, link between inner and tangible roots. This sculpture demands respect: it is composed in its entirety of wax pieces in precarious balance between them, interdependent variables ranging from structural to relational. Whenever one acts within its intimate space, it alters, while the surrounding social space determines existence and nourishment. Static, secular guardian form of becoming, which hides the swarming of microfractures and recomposition by adaptation, in the natural biochemical relationship as well as in human bonds. The work interprets the sculptural foundation of balance and gesture and for the artist's ability to orient the form to the representation of inner bonds between different species and beings. The sculpture proposed by the artist is a metaphorical, discreet but aerial recording of the continuous adaptation to which everything is subjected. In a broader sense, Bertoldo proposes an interesting research on the sculptural potential of organic matter, by nature, in constant transformation.
Menzioni d'onore
Max Mondini
a
(2020, adhesive vinyl print on the wall)
What fascinates and continually motivates me in my artistic creation is the need to find a way to free myself from the constant requests to justify my work, placing the work of art at the centre of all. Try not to fall into the need to understand an act, a form, an idea. Indulge in the freedom to accept a language that is inherently incapable of expressing anything but itself. To place at the centre of everything a delicate, wrong, weak ... arrogant work - which sometimes exists only because it was more difficult not to do it - with its own grammar and presence, a continuous source of second thoughts: an activator that starts our circulatory system, but it gets us nowhere. a consists of an adhesive vinyl print on the wall. Through the digital re-elaboration our gaze slips, conceiving the work as a visual activator. “There is no sense to look for ... it is a flat shape that does not move but imposes a new emotionality to be appreciated. Art is just a beginning, leaving the rest to each of us just like roots do, which feed life, but it is not their job to decide how far the leaves will go. All that is mysterious fascinates and interests, this is not. It only makes the easy difficult through the useless. "Precious and interesting in Max Mondini's work is how the digital imagery we draw on today, which also builds a precise aesthetic imaginary, can become the subject of a pictorial update.
Valerio Veneruso
347.2530633 ∞ 2004-2014
(2020, artist's book, 654 pages, 17 x 22cm)
Starting from a great attraction both towards the act of seeing and the possibility of documenting and collecting testimonies of existences, my main interest is everything that can only be spied on. Through methods ranging from graphics to video, I try to focus all attention on the ability, on the part of new technologies, to increasingly break down the boundaries between the public and private spheres in search of some form of reality that I often manage to find in aesthetic elements such as low resolution or glitching. Also convinced that the work of an artist must be the revelation of the artist himself, I often tend to introduce the viewer into my private life in the hope of triggering a mutual dialogue of empathy capable of making art a common experience. The work consists of the meticulous transcription - for my part - of all the SMS I received from 2004 (the year in which I was given my first mobile phone) until 2014. Covering 10 years of my life, the work inevitably describes a period full of profound changes, above all: a serious loss in the family and the change of my registered residence (from Naples to Treviso), changes that have also opened reflections on the very concept of belonging, understood both from a territorial point of view and, above all, cultural. By questioning personal memory, the work of Valerio Veneruso raises the many questions that are intertwined with the use of the numerous filters that regulate our perception today, be they technological devices or cultural implications.
