OPENING: 

Until September 2013.

WHERE: 

Museo Villa Croce – Genova (ITALY).

… eight times G, yet you can’t see it … maybe a technical failure, the breaking of the neon … maybe a spelling mistake or, maybe again, an indelible scar that changes the overview of the city … GM

On the occasion of Tony Conrad’s exhibition, Farsi la città. Interventions, community and participation, the facade of the Villa Croce Museum houses the work GGGGGGGGenova by Giovanni Morbin (1956) – loaned by the AGI Verona collection. A neon sign repeats the name of the city with a significant difference: the “G” is repeated eight times and, unlike the other letters, is completely obscured. The work expresses the artist’s state of mind immediately after the events of the G8 in Genoa (2001) and was presented in the Villa Croce Museum in 2010 during Off-Cells, a one-day exhibition event curated by Alessandro Castiglioni. For the artist it was in fact essential that this literally city-specific work be made public for the first time in Genoa. The optical distortion created by the multiplication of the “Gs” overwhelms the morphology of the word in a dynamic and aggressive way. The initial seems to chase the other letters with its mouth wide open to engulf them, like the Pac-Man sphere in the famous video game of the 80s, and the luminous zeroing of the capital letter, destined to remain dark, alters the reading of the word, generating the impression of a misspelling or a fault. As Morbin observes, it is “a sign that betrays expectations”. GGGGGGGGenova visualizes the profound moment of rupture in the history of a city marked by an event that has dramatically rewritten its name. After the neon installation by Jorge Méndez Blake, Morbin’s intervention confirms the Museum’s commitment to opening up to the city to emerge from the isolation in which cultural institutions often find themselves. The facade of the museum becomes a sort of blank slate from which the artists launch ethical and aesthetic messages that signal the relevance of contemporary art for the world and of the world for contemporary art.