EXHIBITING EXHIBITION DESIGN IN CONTEMPORARY ART
by Pamela Bianchi in Bild-Raum Wissenschaft, Munich, 2024, pp. 306-308
In the wake of these questions, the ten-year trajectory of the young Italian artist Luca Resta mobilizes the topic of exhibition design by exploiting, above all, the opposition between objects made manually and industrially. the artist explores the social and cultural space he inhabits in order to refine a creative process linked to the practices of accumulation, reproduction, and transformation of everyday objects. like a sort of contemporary archaeology, he explores the vertigo of the series through endless collections of items: disposable cutlery, plastic packaging, hybrid objects, cardboard boxes, and even more ephemeral elements. He investigates the narrative potential of these items, which gradually find their place in his visual imaginary through an expanded idea of sculptural practice. His artistic vocabulary – series and homologation, replication and standardization, industrial accumulation and mechanical iteration – enters into dialogue with his devices and his manual ability. Indeed, from these objects, he creates new marble or stone sculptures to explore the limits of the material, its narrative, and its descriptive capability, to the point of exploring the fictional power of the sculpture. From this approach, multiple sculptural, sound, or architectural projects arise, in which Resta moves beyond the mere objects to explore the related and representative sociocultural logic and to propose other modes of encounter between individuals and forms. Eventually, the aesthetic power of his artistic practice, hidden behind the idea of “common” form, emerges from new ways of looking.
His 2022 exhibition at the Parisian gallery 22,48 m2 was part of this investigation. Motivated to explore the narrative potential of sculpture and various materials, Resta created new forms by hand, insisting on the idea of repetition within difference. neither romantic casts nor copies of reality, Resta’s works express both singularities and pluralities. Simulacra without models, these forms devoid of any resemblance become unique compositions that go beyond the objects to which they refer – in order to, simply, be. Structured from a tension between the singular and the plural, the exhibition reveals a hybrid territory where a series of forms merge with exhibition devices: not sculptures on a pedestal, nor images in a frame, but aesthetic hybridizations that complement one another and whereby the hierarchy between display and subject loses its meaning under the weight of a new way of interpreting the idea of sculpture.
However, the main interest of this exhibition lay above all in the reflection on social relations that the Italian artist puts in place. Interested in the means of access to art, the modalities of aesthetic reading, and the discursive mechanisms specific to the exhibition, and not without denying a certain criticism towards the idea of the institution, Resta appropriates the mechanisms that preside over the social devices typical of institutional and heteronomous spaces to extrapolate a creative process. In doing so, he creates unique sculptures, composed of a series of almost identical objects – but recreated one by one, by hand – inside a typical museum space. In this way, Resta shifts the interest from the single to the group to insist on the establishment of a new form born from the sculptural assembly. By integrating into his collections of everyday objects the devices that structure these spaces of transitory sociability, the artist brings the public into confrontation with the implicit and explicit mechanisms that domesticate the gaze and condition individual and collective behaviour.
P. Bianchi, “Exhibiting exhibition design in contemporary art ”, Bild-Raum Wissenschaft, Munich, 2024
In the wake of these questions, the ten-year trajectory of the young Italian artist Luca Resta mobilizes the topic of exhibition design by exploiting, above all, the opposition between objects made manually and industrially. the artist explores the social and cultural space he inhabits in order to refine a creative process linked to the practices of accumulation, reproduction, and transformation of everyday objects. like a sort of contemporary archaeology, he explores the vertigo of the series through endless collections of items: disposable cutlery, plastic packaging, hybrid objects, cardboard boxes, and even more ephemeral elements. He investigates the narrative potential of these items, which gradually find their place in his visual imaginary through an expanded idea of sculptural practice. His artistic vocabulary – series and homologation, replication and standardization, industrial accumulation and mechanical iteration – enters into dialogue with his devices and his manual ability. Indeed, from these objects, he creates new marble or stone sculptures to explore the limits of the material, its narrative, and its descriptive capability, to the point of exploring the fictional power of the sculpture. From this approach, multiple sculptural, sound, or architectural projects arise, in which Resta moves beyond the mere objects to explore the related and representative sociocultural logic and to propose other modes of encounter between individuals and forms. Eventually, the aesthetic power of his artistic practice, hidden behind the idea of “common” form, emerges from new ways of looking.
His 2022 exhibition at the Parisian gallery 22,48 m2 was part of this investigation. Motivated to explore the narrative potential of sculpture and various materials, Resta created new forms by hand, insisting on the idea of repetition within difference. neither romantic casts nor copies of reality, Resta’s works express both singularities and pluralities. Simulacra without models, these forms devoid of any resemblance become unique compositions that go beyond the objects to which they refer – in order to, simply, be. Structured from a tension between the singular and the plural, the exhibition reveals a hybrid territory where a series of forms merge with exhibition devices: not sculptures on a pedestal, nor images in a frame, but aesthetic hybridizations that complement one another and whereby the hierarchy between display and subject loses its meaning under the weight of a new way of interpreting the idea of sculpture.
However, the main interest of this exhibition lay above all in the reflection on social relations that the Italian artist puts in place. Interested in the means of access to art, the modalities of aesthetic reading, and the discursive mechanisms specific to the exhibition, and not without denying a certain criticism towards the idea of the institution, Resta appropriates the mechanisms that preside over the social devices typical of institutional and heteronomous spaces to extrapolate a creative process. In doing so, he creates unique sculptures, composed of a series of almost identical objects – but recreated one by one, by hand – inside a typical museum space. In this way, Resta shifts the interest from the single to the group to insist on the establishment of a new form born from the sculptural assembly. By integrating into his collections of everyday objects the devices that structure these spaces of transitory sociability, the artist brings the public into confrontation with the implicit and explicit mechanisms that domesticate the gaze and condition individual and collective behaviour.
P. Bianchi, “Exhibiting exhibition design in contemporary art ”, Bild-Raum Wissenschaft, Munich, 2024
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