(un) monuments for V. Tatlin, Marcelo Cidade at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, Italy
Opening: Saturday October 31st 2015, Arco dei Becci 1, 6pm-11pm Until 09.01.2016, Monday–Saturday, 10am–1pm, 2–7pm
Via del Castello 11, San Gimignano, Italy
Galleria Continua is pleased to host (un) monuments for V. Tatlin, a new solo show by Marcelo Cidade, in its San Gimignano exhibition space.
Between 1964 and 1990 the American artist Dan Flavin produced a series of sculptures called Monuments. Made from fluorescent tubes, they were a tribute to the constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, referencing the Russian artist and architect’s Monument to the Third International, or Tatlin’s Tower. This immense tower had been conceived as the home to the Third International, following the 1917 Revolution, and was to have been the beacon of the Monumental Propaganda planned by Lenin.
In the series (un) monuments for V. Tatlin, Marcelo Cidade recreates Flavin’s Monuments using structures for fluorescent tubes. While Flavin’s aim in using the lights was to stress the temporariness of materials and, therefore, of systems – “the American minimalist aesthetic is articulated as an observation of the industrial degradation of Fordism and emphasizes the appropriation of no longer used elements and a new critical functionality”, Cidade specifies – the Brazilian artist explores the theme of ruins. In the works re-created by Cidade, there is no further space for temporariness, there are only the useless remnants of a Utopian plan. “In the 2015 works”, Cidade explains, “we will not see any more blown lights, just the recovered structures of abandoned buildings, unused for a long time and charged with the memory of the deterioration of their own original spaces. The structures are rusty, dirty and without any recoverable system that can turn back on the light with which Flavin intended to “wash” the exhibition spaces where the works were to be presented. Light could be read as a kind of nostalgia, or the hope of seeing a resumption in the construction project dreamt of by the Soviet artists. In my works the Monuments are anachronistic, and serve merely to monumentalize the decline and failure of such a project; this, perhaps, symbolizes the mission of the modern avant-garde movements. In the (un) monuments for V. Tatlin, the promises of the modern world are retrograde and, perhaps, reactionary.”
Marcelo Cidade was born in São Paulo in 1979, where he lives and works. The artist’s aesthetic inquiries revolve around borderline art, a theme he experiments with in a conceptual key through a practice that is often subversive and non-representational, but always directed towards teasing out the expressive possibilities silently interwoven into an urban space. By means of various aesthetic operations, Cidade invents new idioms, constructing fresh and surprising spaces, and bringing out heterotopies, many of which are possible experiments for linking art and life. This art-life relationship authorizes the artist to operate within a continual oscillating flow between the social and the personal sphere. Comparing socially established relations and values, Cidade produces an “aesthetics of resistance”, creates works that express complex social conflicts and brings signs and situations from on the street into spaces given over to art. The artist’s works emphasize the coming together of art and society, without neglecting poetic expression and a discussion of language, also inspired politically by notions of challenge and transgression. One of Cidade’s interests is the public space generated in the urban and technological flux of the surveillance society. He concentrates on one place to reach another one, setting in motion a process of dislocation from the historic-geographic to the poetic. The artist has exhibited at Tate Liverpool, at the Museo d’Arte Moderna MAM SP in São Paulo, at the Triennale of Architecture in Lisbon, at the CCSP - Centro Cultural São Paulo, at MUSAC - Castilla y Léon in Spain, at the 27th Biennale of São Paulo and, in 2013, at the Broad Art Museum and the Krannert Art Museum in Illinois. Invited to take part in the Biennale of Carrara in 2010, he presented large blocks of marble on which he painted three accusations (White Blood, White Hold, White Power).
