Ionesco Suite
January – March 2013
Carlotta Pesce is pleased to present the first preview of Ionesco Suite, the new video by Nicolò Masazza and Jacopo Bedogni, artistically united by the acronym MASBEDO.
During the last decade MASBEDO have placed themselves amongst the most interesting protagonists of video art, producing and exhibiting internationally a series of multimedia installations characterised by crossing over into other artistic disciplines, arising from collaboration with actors, writers and musicians. In their artistic practice cinema, music, theatre and literature are fused in an alchemy of emotionally moving images in a poetic yet disconcerting atmosphere, collocated in a timeless dimension. Streams of complex images, halfway between reality and fiction, create a relationship with the viewer which is rich in illogical and unpredictable visual and intellectual stimuli.
The video conceived for the exhibition at the Studio Carlotta Pesce, produced by Antonio and Annamaria Maccaferri, is the latest in a series of works created in the sublimely beautiful Icelandic landscape and constitutes the second episode of a trilogy that has as its starting point the video Teorema di incompletezza, 2008, included in the Modern and Contemporary Art Collection CRT – Castello di Rivoli, Turin. (The video will be on view at the National Art Gallery of Bologna, from 18th January, on the occasion of Gelo, curated by Gianfranco Maraniello).
The new project evokes one of the principal themes running through MASBEDO’s creative work: sublime and powerful, hostile and primordial nature as a focal point for reflection on the human condition.As in Teorema di incompletezza, the sublimation of a destructive act takes place in a surreal atmosphere. The same table reappears laid with crystal vases, which may be interpreted symbolically as elements of perfection and pureness, vases which may be filled with anything, like life at the beginning. A shower of confetti falls on the table, followed by cakes, sweets and sugared almonds. Finally a violent flow of cement destroys and invades the entire environment. The colourful lightness of theconfetti, representing the purity of childhood, is contrasted with the achromatic heaviness of cement, a metaphor for adult life.
Beside the video, photographic works and a video sculpture will be on view at the Studio Carlotta Pesce.
Nicolò Masazza (Milano 1973) and Jacopo Bedogni (Sarzana 1970) live and work between Milan and Berlin. They have taken part in several international collective exhibitions including: 2012 Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Giornate degli Autorii, Venice International film festival. 2011 Art Unlimited, Art Basel; MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome. 2010 GAM Gallery of Modern Art of Turin; ; Reina Sofia National Museum Art Centre, Madrid. 2009 LIII Venice Biennale; 2006 Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art, Prato.
In 2013 they will contribute to the prestigious collective exhibition Clouds. Landscape from Romanticism to the present, Leopold Museum, Vienna.
Their works are included in important public and private collection: Modern and Contemporary Art Collection CRT – Castello di Rivoli, Turin; MACRO, Roma; DA2 Museo de Arte Contemporanea Salamanca; CAAM, Las Palmas, Junta de Andalucia; CAIRN Digne; Tel Aviv Art Museum.