Text Laura Barreca
30.04/01.07.2010
Work in three acts, without an end (and without a title)
Christian Frosi’s project for his first solo exhibition in Palermo started at a time when part of the world was encircled by the huge cloud of water vapour, carbon dioxide, fluorine and silicon ash which had burst from the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull. With nothing that could be done, it remained blocked in Milan, arriving at Palermo three days after the pre-arranged first day of Christian’s residence in Sicily. However, Christian decided to still attempt his journey, but in a different way and above all, in a different place. So, with the collaboration of Francesco Pantaleone, the website www.oooooooblackcloud.net was born, a space created to be like an online editorial project, which from the 28th April, the artist has been using to display photos, maps and images found in every part of the cloud’s evolution. He also uses it to spontaneously add anything that he finds interesting, curious, suggestive or bizarre. The result of ww.oooooooblackcloud.net is an open work, continuously being renovated, where unpredictability and vagueness have come together to make it an alive space, before during and after the exhibition in Palermo. Frosi’s interest in the clouds and in the chemical dimensions which modify the body’s changes of state started a few years ago. In particular in 2008 when the cloud yippipie formed in Australia’s sky. The artist set off to the continent to observe and study the cloud, with a grant from Castello di Rivoli, convinced that even such an elusive cloud can express the idea of sculpture in a utopic and futuristic form. The title, which has a good six ‘o’s proceeding the “black cloud”, looks somewhat like a swear word, or an exclamation. Like the handwritten repetition of a sign in Marinetti’s futuristic poems- the “poems tosave”- in which the words are arranged to make designs, to construct the sense of the image, like the name of the website. The choice of his titles is not a coincidence, however. In fact, as Frosi himself said (regarding the title with ten ‘o’s at the work exhibited at the Ambient Tour, at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo di Torino in 2007): “I find it interesting because of its audio aspect.” Marinetti and Russolo, we are sure, agree.
The black cloud of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which had in the meantime blocked half the world, dissolved and disappeared to who knows where and the airplanes took to the air again, including the one that took Christian to his destination. Christian describes his arrival in Palermo with the enthusiasm of someone who has just started his journey of discovery, with eyes and mind ready to both receive and give. In Frosi’s work, like that of an explorer, unpredictable things often occur which can all of a sudden mark new paths for the artist to take. For example, finding an old window in the streets of the Zisa quarter and then using it as the soul of a sculpture on show at the exhibition. The use of found objects, relics and knick-knacks had its first historical monument in Karl Switters’ ‘Merzbau’, and returns to the work of the Milanese artist like a choice of language. Like the ‘Merzbau’, disintergrated below the bombs of WWI, Frosi’s window ends up in many little pieces inside three big tubes of fir wood, leaning on some grass roots pointing out of the window of Francesco Pantaleone’s gallery, overlooking Piazzetta Garraffello in the Vuccirìa quarter. This area, in the heart of Palermo, is also ripped apart by the wartime bombings, making it effectively another type of ‘Merzbua’, one of urban dimensions. The wooden sculptures New Title YYYYYYY Window, 2010, describe the piazza, the city, the shreds of its story, what remains of the past and of its present story, encapsulating a memory within an object. This approach of Frosi’s reflects his desire to break up, analyse and then reconstruct, like archiving, creating a process which has been entrusted with a lot critical interpretation. The structure is like “an expedient graphic which describes the increase in speed next to the speed of light” which “restores a movement, a verticality or an acceleration.” In a dark environment, it is only visible through the dim light of electric torches. Four inflatable balls support a pyramid structure constructed by wooden bases. The instillation New Title OOOO la stanza favorita, 2010, is striking in its physical texture within the exhibition area. In the third of Christian Frosi’s projects in Palermo, Dalk CCCCCCC, 2010, the artist presents us once again with the fact that a work of art is, in reality, a process and not an object, and that the objects help to establish the relationship between places and people, working as elements that contaminate a space, in an almost viral way. Some of the sculptures are sculpted into ‘C’ shapes of various sizes which are not only exhibited in the gallery, the original place to exhibit them, but they often also end up on the shop counters of the Vuccirìa, spread throughout the city, or in the hands of the people the artist choses to photograph, to document the infinitely possible variations. At the same time, the ‘C’ garden, the instillation on the walls of the TV support and palm leaves, 2010, represents the ultimate hypothesis of possible sculpture, an oxymoron of two diametrically opposite materials, one wasted away and the other one surviving in eternal durability.
