DIDIER RITTENER

Belonged to this World

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OPENING:  Saturday, 04 March 2006 – H 6.00 pm

06 March 2006 – 22 April 2006

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Curated by MARINELLA PADERNI

On Saturday 4 March at 6.00 pm the Arte Ricambi gallery in Verona inaugurates “Belonged to this world“, the first Italian solo show of the Swiss artist Didier Rittener who, for the occasion, presents an impressive installation of polyester sculptures and a series of transfers and pencil drawings on large format paper.

Coming from the artist’s recent Parisian exhibition at the Center d’Art d ‘Ivry Le Credac, the sculptures are three-dimensional human-sized black stars with the emblematic title “Auto-protection.” Positioned along the gallery, the stars saturate the space and, at the eyes of the viewer, create a sort of “curtain”. The geometric shape and the black color also refer to the difficult image of the concrete and iron blocks used in the military field as defensive barriers. In the exhibition, their symbolic presence is placed in relation to the original black transfers on which the artist created collages of images taken from books and magazines. Tattooed faces of dark boys, wild animals, skulls and deserted landscapes are combined with abstract graphic elements, icons, words and “text-objects” which appear as elements of a symbolic cosmogony. Decontextualized and “transferred” to another plane of signification, these fragments of our visual culture – above all of the “low”, popular culture – acquire the intimate beauty of the drawing and the poetic autonomy of the object with respect to media and serial images.

The multiple conceptual and symbolic values of an image, artistic creation in relation to the production and reproduction of images, the visual cultural heritage and collective memory in an era characterized by spectacularization and virtuality constitute the field of action of the work by Didier Rittener.

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