Installations modify the environment using light and underlining aesthetically interesting relations between forms of nature or human contexts built for other ends, like living or working spaces: they provide a space for thought and allow both a conceptual as well as aesthetic approach to art.
Gianni Capitani's exposition attempts to show the fissures existing in living contexts already cracked by time and lack of use. From fissures discovered in the web of reality, Capitani's work allow the emergence of light and infinity, where form denies itself and points towards the ineffable as an access to experimentation. Minute interventions call our attention towards that which is present but we never notice with any interest, as with playing balls on a wall decayed by the passage of time, where the natural and the human miraculously intertwine. Blessed architecture floating beyond its function in a universe of meaning that nurtures our sight and our dreams. Or a chair staring at a blocked door where the essence of the door is underlined through the loss of its function, thus emphasizing its symbolic value as initiation into the experience of going through. From a black door comes the dream of a wall in love. A mirror breaks our way of seeing joining earth and heaven. Shadows and bricks dance a yet unknown dance.
In the paintings, signs are made with color over color, the same but more dense, and form dissolves through the light effects revealing underlying spaces, demanding a differentiated attention, abnormal in a world where only that which shouts can be seen. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beauty that inhabits Gianni Capitani's eyes seeks shelter in the eye of the visitor, conducted through a series of forms which are also a travel through time, the time of the life of the artist, a scrutinizer of the world and creator of forms that attempt to bring light and infinity to a world limited by our everyday living.
Faith, hope and charity: the girls from which our soul arises.
Paolo Quattrini
AQUÍ / 2001
Architecture from the past reveals the forms of human territory, its culture. To approach them is to make archeology of the present. Inscribed in them is the effort to dominate nature, to edify and inhabit. Ruins speak to us about the “here” and “then”. The crossing of place and time suggests the irregularity of historic development, the various interruptions and hesitant answers to artistic problems through the stages of humanity, as pointed out by George Kubler in The Configuration of Time. As the self-consciousness of post-modernity has collapsed the notion of lineal, historic and progressive time, truth is revealed in the updated meaning of ruins.
Gianni Capitani found his place next to the Gallery of Contemporary Art and Design in Puebla, in the refurbished space of San Francisco, where abandoned industrial ruins from past centuries offers huge spaces. Open space as well as closed ones of great height, hollows and structures, walls chipped by humidity, others ruined with growing vegetation. Gianni has made here a delicate intervention, a subtle deployment of aesthetic recovery that can almost be unnoticed. That is his purpose: to reveal what is there, now. Thus the title of the intervention: “Here”. It is not an ostentatious imposition, but rather a graceful appropiation of space. Gianni, with intelligent and open dialogue, did not make a high impact presentation,
or a novelty. Resources were limited to minimalist artistic baggage, povera and very straight forward references, as when he evokes Anish Kapoor, not for the sake of imitation, but for an incorporation of assimilated elements which mix with other elements of tentative exploration producing a worthy intervention on space. As visitors go in, they can discover the artificial elements superimposed over the ruined construction. By discovering that all additions harmonize with the environment, the visitor can see the formative reason of pieces and colors added to the space in the form of sculpture, paintings and installation which, at the same time, asserted that the place in ruins will sometime disappear. A rythm that sequentially activates past time with the present inscribed in the ruins which, at a later date, will inevitably be covered by forms that our contemporary modern world hides.
Ramón Almela
Noviembre 2001/Marzo 2012