OVER is an anthological exhibition that constitutes something of a platform, where artists who use different languages coexist in a general artistic and aesthetic panorama in a constant state of flux. Quite apart from those cells that are still vigorously distinguished by the paradigms of the Avant-garde, whose nucleus anticipated the figure of an militant artist involved socially and politically in its evolutionary developments, for the generation of artists who were born in the sixties and seventies, the concept of irreversibility and of stylistic consistency has become drastically absent these days.

Some of these artists feature in OVER, on the one hand to underscore – this is the curator’s intention – the blurred sense of historical belonging that is now somewhat dated, while on the other to convey an understanding of the extent to which the identity of the transition, transmedia and unisexuality of languages has driven artists and historians to devote attention to a re-examination of history, in its progressive, evolutionary significance, erecting a major question mark against the assumptions of the latter half of the last century and elaborating (and sometimes theorising) Post-Modernity. While some deplore that the trail was already blazed for a return to traditional academic forms towards the end of the sixties in the direction of painting, drawing and the plastic arts, on the other hand this phenomenon – which coincides with a social fallout set free of ideologies, but not always completely free of nostalgic revivals or forms of inurement to the image dictated by the “age of reproducibility” – encourages us to look at the globality of a society in a state of change and growth and to ponder a phenomenon that has obvious parallels in other areas of socio-political geography in the environs of art.

It is vitally important now to look back and reconsider times in history of no great remoteness, when the relationship between art and the market was in its heyday and such concepts as fashion, the market and strategies of cultural policy seemed to be the driving force – and not only in artistic terms – of the art world. The market in particular used to dictate the rules, transforming the museum from a place of intellectual intercourse into a customer base for a critical mass paying for those forms of exhibitions that are often devoid of representation, but in which the blockbuster concept and the system of approved curators have replaced – in the majority of such cases – the classical, traditional universe of thinking and of authenticity.
In the midst of unrelenting criticism of these often deleterious forms and methods of policy, some more or less parallel morphologies of artistic creations are coming into being as a sort of counterbalance, opening up new ways and additional spaces of discussion, to the point that serious questions are being raised about the identity and utility of the museum as a place for preserving history and its memory.

The artists shown in this exhibition are young: of all of them it can be said that they are to some extent lifted from their own creative processes and placed in the new context of a curatorial experience whose matrix is simply anthological. The passage is one from a conceptual-theosophist experience, that only a handful of curators was capable of applying to the specifics of a given period in history, to the simply visual, sensorial and analytical experience related the image and its representation.

Mario Casanova, 2015 [translation Pete Kercher]

Ph. Pier Giorgio De Pinto © PRO LITTERIS Zürich.