IN ARCHIVIO

PAOLO CHIASERA

May 29 > August 31, 2008
curated by Danilo Eccher

Image: PAOLO CHIASERA/MACRO, Forget the heroes, 2008, Still da video, Tecnica mista; 4 canali video, Foto: Luca Fontana, Collezione MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma

In the Panorama Galleries, the exhibition space devoted to young artists, MACRO is presenting Forget the Heroes, the new project by Paolo Chiasera which is destined for the Museum’s Permanent Collection.

A young artist from Bologna, Paolo Chiasera (1978) is one of the most promising emerging talents on the contemporary art scene. True to its mission to support and promote emerging art, MACRO is hosting the project, which is based on the transformation of the theories of four important people who made their mark on the twentieth century: for economics there is Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century economist and philosopher who paved the way for the free-enterprise economy; for town planning, Le Corbusier, the early twentieth-century architect who created a town plan for three million inhabitants by making a careful separation of space; for information technology Seymour Cray, the electronic engineer who designed the simultaneous calculation systems that are now used for video animations; and for linguistics, Noam Chomsky, the founder of transformational-generative grammar based on man’s innate understanding of the universal principles that regulate the creation of language.

Paolo Chiasera | Forgotten heroes, 2004
Paolo Chiasera | Forgotten heroes, 2004

The case that Chiasera presents in Forget the Heroes is that, although the theories expressed by Smith, Le Corbusier, Cray, and Chomsky are valid and well-grounded, the fact that they conflict with cultural, economic, and social situations regulated by constantly evolving laws, means that they lose the directions indicated by their original postulates, bringing about a loss of control and unexpected consequences.

The exhibition winds its way through the two Panorama Galleries: in the first, there are four continuous video screenings, and in the second there is a reconstruction of the “artist’s workshop”.
In the first video, in the first gallery, the destruction of the life-size clay statues of the iconic figures of Smith, Le Corbusier, Cray and Chomsky, metaphorically represent the fall of their utopian ideas. In the next two videos, we see close-ups of the artist’s hands, first as he grips a hammer in order to smash the remaining pieces of the statues, and then as they hold a stick to mix up new material in a trough, creating a hypnotic and symbolic vortex of the melting pot of historic ideologies mixed together to make new ones.
In the last video, the artist’s hands are intent on shaping a new and germinal shape – a metaphor of new utopias to be negotiated.

Paolo Chiasera | Forgotten heroes, 2004
Paolo Chiasera | Forgotten heroes, 2004

In the next gallery, together with a number of drawings of the personalities and their works, which Chiasera likes to refer to as the “sentimental storyboard of the project”, he has created his “artist’s workshop”. The instruments and tools he used to make the sculptures are arranged in this space.

Paolo Chiasera has taken part in numerous group exhibitions, including: in 2005, (my private) HEROES, MARTa, Herford, and T1 – La Sindrome di Pantagruel, Turin; in 2006, Italy Made in Art Now at the Museum for Contemporary Art, Shanghai; in 2007, Laws of Relativity at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin.
His solo exhibitions include: in 2005, Young Dictators’ Village, W139, Amsterdam; in 2006, The Trilogy: Cornelius at MAMbo, Bologna; in 2007, Tupac Project, at LAF Limehouse Arts Foundation, Raine’s Foundation School, London.