Opening: Saturday August 26th 9pm
The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the
resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do
even better in airless space
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
With our feet always glued to the ground, we yearn to fly or, better still, to levitate, to hover gently and detach ourselves from that powerful, inevitable and compelling force that keeps us stuck to the ground. The force of gravity that we experience, without noticing it, every minute, makes us perceive space and objects as a specific system of relationships. At first glance, this is how the things around us and with which we interact seem to serve a singular and constant function. But if we explore things beyond their use and even beyond their form, their materiality enables the expansion of a restrained, potential force. Nicolás Robbio transforms this form of observation into a theory of drawing. However, thinking through drawing is not merely an interest in projecting wishes onto paper, but in thinking about the infinite lines within and outside the plane, together with the will of materials to delineate a place. The study of these possibilities turns drawing into a drift of thoughts through space.
This exhibition encompasses a series of investigations that the artist has undertaken into the tensions between materials, their counterweights and the capacity of a line to hold, sustain and withstand the weight of objects. Theory of Suspension involves a twofold procedure: the possibility of marking in space the force that keeps us glued to the ground and the opportunity to imagine a state of exception, of suspension of such a force, as a way of signalling it from its opposite. Whereas in this scheme architecture is shown as a seemingly empty container, the net puts space in suspense.
The system of relations presented here is not intended to replace the theory of gravity with the theory of suspension. Its aim is not to open up fields where a hypothesis is refuted, confronted or confirmed, but to conduct experiments that reveal signals about space. Nicolas Robbio's work delves into a state of affairs in which our current perception is reasserted and reformulated on the basis of a set of operations, relations, and links. Curved and straight lines, like domes or pyramids, are drawn by the very weight of things, or better still, by the possibility afforded by the force of gravity on suspension. In this attempt to present a series of situations with different materials and elements, elevation and suspension are examined as cumulative forces. These practices produce scenes of a fragile stillness given by the unstable equilibrium, a suspended time that is entered stealthily so as not to disturb a stability that hangs by a thin thread, that rests on the edge of the ledge, and that can be shattered with just a snap of the finger.
Clarisa Appendino
