Cultural Product

Cultural Product
Serving Suggestion

Saturday, December 22, 2012

The answer my friends is blowing in the wind

This week I had the fortune of installing my show at Margo Lewer's house in Penrith, for a solo exhibition titled Plastici. This show has been a long time in the making and was a delight to complete in this wonderful house, bequeathed by the wondrous Margo in 1978. The exhibition entails the works I'd made at Tokyp Wonder Site last year, on my Asialink scholarship, and further developed in Yokohama with Bec Dean as part of Life 3 by Bank Art at Shin-Minatomira. And finally completed here. I found the resolution of the works relatively easy, as the Gallery's resources provided exactly what I needed; re-inforcing my precepts concerning synchronicity. In fact, once again, during install I was comforted by the magic of things fitting together and trusting my intuition to a deep level. I would sit out in the garden, and a leaf would fall. Nature always delivers if you wait for long enough. Suffice to say, this was the best show I've ever done and the most amazing venue to install in. I felt a deep connection with all the other artists I've ever seen exhibit here or anywhere for that matter, as their work informs mine and we all do what we have to do. Art is wonderful, creating is wondrous, and being an artist sometimes makes me feel like the luckiest person alive. Plastici comes from a journal, I think by the same title that Georgio Morandi worked on in the early 20th Century.
Valori plastici was established in Rome by the painter and art collector Mario Broglio (1891-1948) in 1918.[1][2] He also edited the magazine which focused on aesthetic ideals and metaphysical artwork. It supported the art movement Return to order so as to create a change of direction from the extreme avant-garde art of the years up to 1918, taking its inspiration from traditional art instead.[3] The term "return to order" to describe this renewed interest in tradition is said to derive from Le rappel a l'ordre, a book of essays by the poet and artist Jean Cocteau published in 1926. The movement itself was a reaction to the War. Cubism was abandoned even by its creators, Braque and Picasso, and Futurism, which had praised machinery, violence and war, was rejected by most of its followers. The return to order was associated with a revival of classicism and realistic painting. The magazine theorised the retrieval of national and Italic values, as promoted by the cultural policies of fascism, but also looking at wider horizons within Europe and using a vivid artistic dialectics with a return to a classic figurative source. Alberto Savinio,[4] in the 1st issue of Valori plastici on 15 November 1918, announced a programme of total individualistic, anti-futurist and anti-Bolshevik restoration. In his first article of April–May 1919, entitled Anadioménon, Savinio expounds the intellective and enigmatically atemporal intuition which animates the world of this new "metaphysical classicism".[5] The Savinian principles on mataphisical poetics are applied to painting by Giorgio de Chirico, by Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi.