COMBINATIONS: REFLECTING ON SILENCE is the first exhibition to be inaugurated in 2014 by the MACT/CACT. Three exhibiting artists are featured: Margret Eicher, Fabrizio Sacchetti and Christian Zucconi.

Photography, video and tapestry in large formats are the techniques used by the artists, who tackle the issues raised by the identity of a changing society, starting out from the media they use. What we generally find is a depreciation in the vitality of self-referential artistic language that was a characteristic trait, from the seventies onwards, of a substantial part of artistic output, which was fraught with perilous imitations and relationships. While technology, technique and machines have somehow and to a certain extent at least given rise to – where they have not induced –a now somewhat tarnished aesthetic with a conceptualist matrix now drained of all logical meaning, it can be said with equal truth today that a creative’s linguistic capacities are not enough to justify the epithet of artist.
The quest for themes that are expressed with exemplary skill of execution would appear to point us back towards what curators might dub a ‘retro-garde’, in which the representation and exaltation of the conceptual seems to be freeze-dried in the principle of the artist-in-residence. To discuss intermittences, the rounding of the circle or the squaring of the square, a parrot on a perch and the application of academic notions to design curtains no longer qualifies as the criterion for appraising the art of the future. We have also shaken off the deadwood of the idea that art cannot be objectively functional.

This is the second time that Fabrizio Sacchetti (1969) is being hosted by the MACT/CACT to show his photography and video work, whose nature is to employ a form of mapping of his own body for the purpose of addressing his inner universe. The photographic works date back to the early nineties, when a comparison with special-effect digitalisation in photography was still a distant prospect for a young artist. The result is surprising, while the video entitled Tear-action somehow expresses the end of an era.

Christian Zucconi (1978) is also showing for the second time in our institution, where this time he is presenting large format photographic portraits. Ash is the title of this series of several dozen works, comprising shots focusing on the body, a topic close to the Italian sculptor’s heart and his psychological reflexes. Like so many caryatids, they seem to bear the weight of the world’s History with a capital H, as well as of its lesser human histories.

An epic take is told in a contemporary key by the tapestries created by Germany’s Margret Eicher (1955), creating a documentary record of the recent social and political vicissitudes of our civil and institutional society. Working almost exclusively in large formats, she revives the tradition of antique tapestry, blending it with a representation of topics taken from everyday news features to restore interpretative capacity to the topics depicted, with a sense of drama that is often lost by the visual pollution of today’s image overload. Using artistic language and an intelligent application of art, Eicher succeeds in calling her spectators’ attention to their surroundings.

Mario Casanova, 2014 [translation Pete Kercher]

Ph. Pier Giorgio De Pinto © PRO LITTERIS Zürich.