FOR THE SECOND TIME IN ITALY
The C+N Gallery CANEPANERI was happy to announce “Weakening”. This is the second solo exhibit in Italy concerning the British artist Roger Hiorns (Birmingham, 1975, he lives and works in London). It consisted of paintings, objects and a film. The exhibited works use an apparently easy whole the material and abstract processes – unction, control, concealment, reversal – for exploring how the power acts on and through the bodies, technologies and systems of thought, and how it can be neutralized
THE NEW PAINTINGS
In the new Hiorns’ paintings, abstract and vaguely insectoid human forms get involved in instinctive actions that could be sex, or a new and ambiguous kind of movement. The environment where they live – a landscape, a sky? – is characterised by dirty turquoise spots and a light rose pigment. It looks dreamlike, almost unbelievable and a place where the normal logics are not completely adopted. Here and over there, the surfaces of Hiorns’ canvas are corrupted by fleshy latex octopuses, or cancelled by clear expansions of blue copper sulphate. The latter is a substance which suggests an authorial, inorganic and all-consuming growth. The artist refers to these artworks as “trans” paintings, recalling the Latin prefix that means in different ways, “across”, “over”, “by means of” and “in order to change”. Notoriously, their colours make us recall the flag ones of transgender solidarity.
THE ARTWORKS
A pair of found white polystyrene containers laid open on the gallery floor. It was how they were livestock troughs, or maybe empty sarcophaguses. The artist treated their interiors with a washing of liquefied bovine brain matter. Now this dry material in a stable skin of structural protein, is a residue of unknown cognitive activity – and in fact, unknowable.
PRAYER IS NOT A CRIME OF THOUGHT
In a found photographic picture, overturned on canvas and stained of blue copper sulphate crystals, it was possible to see two fundamentalist Christian demonstrators who brandished protest signs in front of a clinic for abortions. Quite the opposite, the text said “PRAYER IS NOT A CRIME OF THOUGHT” – an unintentionally ironic statement that presumed they believed that their actions of plea would have been noticed and honoured by a supernatural power.
A RETROSPECTIVE VIEW OF THE PATHWAY
The new black and white film by Hiorns reconsidered one of his important projects, called “A Retrospective View of the Pathway” (2016). For this project he buried a military aircraft in Eastern England. The film of the aircraft planting was inverted according to Sabatier’s effect, in order that dark shades appear clear and clear shades dark – an U-turn echo made by the artist, when he removed this lethal piece of machinery from the sky and then positioned it on the ground. The film soundtrack included both recordings on the burial field and human digestive system noises. The suggested idea was that the aircraft was processed – maybe also assimilated – from an invisible body. We wondered what strange nutrients it could release?
Tom Morton
Informazioni
Roger Hiorns. Weakening
Opening days: on Thursday 14th November, at 6pm
From 14th November 2024 to 14th January 2025
Opening times: from Tuesday to Friday, at 10am-6pm. On Saturday by appointment
Info to the general public: Tel +39 02 36768281 info@canepaneri.com www.canepaneri.com )