curated by Agata Polizzi
10 October- 5 December 2015
Looking through something and often not seeing anything, finding oneself exposed without being seen, continuing to be isolated, perhaps ignored, finding oneself chasing a rhythm that requires one’s own social and cultural strategies: Giovanni Termini explores the possibility of thinking back to an intimate and hidden inner space that is often invisible, a place of experimentation in which everyone seeks to reinvent contexts, if necessary, to create a different reality, perhaps even an alternative one.
“Grado di tensione” – Degree of Tension – redefines this essentially inner exploration, starting from the physical space of Francesco Pantaleone’s art gallery in Palermo. Here, the space becomes a constructive element, a workshop where residual elements and debris are accumulated in an order of their own, blocking the view, a sort of massive interruption that makes everything a part of the upheaval.
Almost mirroring the obstacle, there are a series of openings that let the light filter through, opening on the outer world and mirroring oneself in infinite selves. Termini takes inspiration from George Orwell’s utopia in1984 where it describes the headquarters of the Ministry of Truth, without any windows and yet capable of being the absolute center of a distorted power.
Termini goes as far as tearing down some sections of the walls from the space, fitting them back into Strappo – Tear – redefining perimeters and charting out new boundaries; he interferes with the distribution and exposure, and everything partakes of the energized tension and is functional to it. Narrowing space means multiplying new points of view, new paths; it means pointing to new directions to be taken.
It is a dense stylistic choice, laden with roughness, yet at the same time rigorous. The entire work is a powerful magnet that continues arousing feelings; it is a composite work that remains inside but that is also in contact with what is outside, with what is going on all around in an interesting dialogue with the city, with its noise and with its hectic and chaotic vitality, with the harshness of the alleys, with the poetry of decadence present here and there in the architecture.
The series Vedute – Vistas – breaks out from this view, affording glimpses hinting at a city that still has not found redemption, on the outskirts of Italy, the Bel Paese, where the abandonment becomes systematic at times, even perversely fascinating. Faded images in which the markedly graphic sign repeats a formal rigor felt throughout the exhibition, a sort of leitmotiv in Termini’s exploration, the constant attention to the meaning of the limit, which involves continuously challenging oneself, a way of always being on the brink, capable of withstanding the blows landed by the uncertainty of a time in which one needs to change pace at a supersonic and unsettling speed.
