Belvedere 01 and Fluo Riana

Of stateless water. We need ports to dock, sailing boats and fins for swimming. We are fish out of water.

Port Tonic Art Center is an international artist residence and contemporary art center on the French Riviera, and has replaced the original functions of the settlement for the repair of pleasure boats.

The artificial marina, now unused, is back a paradise for fish and a kind of artificial/natural pool for swimming away from the waves of the open sea.

Port Tonic is like a helicopter in stationary flight: it resists the forces of nature, attracted by the earth, aims the horizon reacting to the sea.

Davide d’Elia
Port Tonic Art Center (PTAC) – Les Issambres – Frenche Riviera – France
Résidence, Eté 2019

 The fishing floats found among the materials of Port Tonic represent the unit of measurement of this tension, microsystems with an elaborate and functional architecture, structures able to coexist with the ecosystem that encompasses them.

Like amphibious sculptures they float between water and air: The camouflaged und. The upper part, instead, light and tapered, stretches with fluorescent colors to be able to be sighted by human eye even from a distance.

The works created during the 2019 residence are set up in the corner of the exhibition hall in dialogue with the large windows that frame the sea, are measured with the horizon line, real or supposed, duet with her by moving the planes of the scene.

There are three focal points around which the works presented at PTAC unfold: perception of the horizon, perception of time, buoyancy.

Central position of the Sunserif installation : the plastic strips that until a month before were completely covered with aluminum powder, then partially cleaned and made transparent again, continue and invite you to think about the sunset line.

Sunserif

Opposite, next to the large corner glass window, on the small square window, the line between sea and sky is accentuated by the application of a transparent vinyl on the glass: the intervention, Belvedere 01, blocks the movement of the sea from view thanks to the superimposition of a monochrome iris blue, a sort of suspension of the horizon that dialogues with the ideal line described by Sunserif.

Around this horizontal veil, a series of schematically painted works with acrylic colors on fabrics different from the increasingly hot perception and vice versa, so we will have a sort of thermometric pyramid : the warmest moldy fabric of the damask fabric that is warmer than the fabric tartan up to the coldest and most glacial iris blue.

 The Isla Fluo Tante 00/01/02, the three diptychs on the walls are crossed by the horizontal boundary along the equilibrium line between hot and cold perception.

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  Isla Fluo Tante 00

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  Isla Fluo Tante 01 and 02

 Isla Fluo Tante 00 is the synthesis of a total perception of tartan fabric on floral damask.

 In the Isla Fluo Tante 01 diptych, the two parts of a float are painted : the aerial part is painted on damask fabric while the underwater part is on moldy fabric.

 In Isla Fluo Tante 02  the temperature of perception rises towards lightness, or if we prefer towards the artificial, here the painted float relates in the upper part to a canvas of iris blue antifouling painted in the lower part to a tartan fabric .

 Lying on the floor, resting on two soft protective supports, Fluo Tante 00  and Fluo Tante 02  painted in acrylic on tartan fabric, are the only works not to float, for the moment, but in power and fully suited to do so.

Fluo Tante 00 et Fluo Tante 02

 To the right of Belvedere 01, Fluo Riana is suspended, unique and on a single support, painted cold iris blue anti-fouling and fluorescent acrylic floating on a “warm” support of vintage floral damask fabric.

Fluo Riana

 Proceeding towards the corner of the two windows, going around Sunserif, you come across The Notary : an antique frame (beginning of the 1900s) arrived at Port Tonic Art Center with me, from Rome, and as I have suffered action of the horizon. The work is being worked by scraping the wood down to reduce it to the minimum thickness and proceeding, along its height, to immerse it in its same shape, accentuated this, by a sort of “tsunami” inverse of antifouling iris blue paint.

The Notary

 

The Notary resembles, unintentionally, the landing in front of Port Tonic, a sort of flat “C” that surrounds a small mirror of water; randomness? Maybe. Even if on the horizon one never reacts by chance.

Leonardo Petrucci resided for a month and a half at Port Tonic Art Center and produced consistent number of new works thanks to the strongly inspiring place and the solitary location by the sea of this old shipyard.

The light also influenced the work during his stay as it is the typical very bright light of the French Coast during the day and a very dark and starry light in the night.

There isn’t any light pollution and stars can be seen clearly at night. This aspect has a major importance as Petrucci research focuses on alchemy and science but more on astronomy.

The result of the residence is a series of works coherently connected to his research but more than ever, deeply forged by the intense force of nature.

The first series is “Lazy eclipses”, an installation of ten small works representing the sequence of a moon eclipse obtained by a new and long (lazy) intervention by the artist on black paper on canvas.

The “Atmospheric sculptures” 01 and 02 are made from “Tonic” water plastic bottles deformed or we should say “sculpted” by the atmospheric overhang during the Rome-Nice flight to get to Port Tonic residency. The artist than used them to make concrete sculptures in a four-hand work of art with nature.

The “Fisherman”is a rope found in the hangar and embedded in hexagonal concrete, recalling the spiral as a symbol of infinity, just as the hexagon is a geometric shape that fills the space infinitely (like beehive), forever fixing a fundamental element to fishing in the matter, or an object that connects the sea with the sky.

The “Hyper Ammonite” site-specific is a 2m by 2m intervention. It consists of 16 shells sculptures made of Port Tonic concrete and sea water and positioned on the wall-drawing of a hypercube. The shells are painted with cephalopods ink. Each of them represents a spiral, the oldest symbol of infinity and liaison of man to God while they delimit the hypercube, an impossible cube as made of four dimensions and so that cannot be visualized by a human eye which has been grown in a tridimensional space. The works connects to a new approach to reality which contemplates the basis of quantum physics and philosophy.

The “Nugget” is a powerful sculpture made of basalt found stone in Port Tonic and a golden shell recalling the symbol of infinity. The artist action to sculpt the symbol and to embellish it with the most noble dress as gold, recalls the alchemist role in the research of the absolute truth and perfection. The golden Nugget represents the origin, or we should say the absolute truth, inaccessible to human knowledge. It is embedded in history, in a basalt stone, the oldest magmatic stone on earth that brings memory of our past.

For the installation in Port Tonic the two artists Cécile van Hanja and Jeroen van der Beek gathered their ideas on perspective.

Cécile van Hanja, who has traditionally made paintings of modern architecture, made the connection between the construction of the Port Tonic Pavilion and the constructions of Modernist architects such as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. These are the same straight lines and the same open spaces that reminded him of the Modernist villas in his own paintings, he only lacked a swimming pool in front of the existing building.

For Jeroen van der Beek, who specializes in 3D installations, the importance was to be able to confuse the visitor between what is real and what is not. Then the idea of ​​the confusion of a two-dimensional perspective in a three-dimensional environment became the basis of the project. Then the two artists made the project on the large asphalt platform in front of the Port Tonic Pavilion, extending the vertical and horizontal lines of the building with lines of white paint with gray shadows and a blue pool in front.

For the observer who will cross the platform, the lines will appear accidentally posed. But when he or she reaches the observer point, where the perspective will begin to work, the random lines will suddenly create a two storey high modern structure with the existing building. As in the paintings of Cécile van hanja, the reflections of the building will be visible in the illusory pool. But when the observer takes a step further, the structure will collapse into a labyrinth of lines that will leave him in the confusion of what is real and what is not.

For a competition that invited artists to present their projects, Davide d’Elia proposed “Rinvigorito”, an ambitious work combining spaces, perceptions and technologies. We are now looking for sponsors to finance this project.

IOBOA (1) :

IOBOA, an anthropomorphous floating plastic buoy. The standard buoys are generally composed of the union of two solid cuneiform specular fgures, such a union allows them to foat, the two parts (lower / upper) the one almost completely immersed, the other emerged are antithetical and complementary; in Ioboa one part recalls the appearance of the heavy marble bust, the other one of a commonly used buoy. Contrary to its statuary reference, the buoy is light, can travel by water and on the ground, is the playful part of RINVIGORITO, the one who is present in place of the bust, but who narrates the deeds and to which it refers. Te work refers to the sense of the limit between water and air, but also to a shared experience, that of man who sees in the buoy a warning, a limit to be reached and not overcome. Ioboa will be produced in triplicate.

VR (3) :

During the permanence of the “Reinvigorito” marble bust in the waters of Forte Marghera, a video camera capable of recording high-resolution stereoscopic flms is placed in an amphibious device, which allows recording under the surface of the water to create a 360-degree video. degrees with 5K resolution. The video camera, placed in front of the work at a distance of about 3 meters, will be positioned on a pole to allow the viewer of the immersive video to have a view half-way out and for the remaining half immersed. In the exhibition, the user will be able to observe the marble band “Rinvigorito” outside and under water, thus succeeding in reviving the peculiar characteristics of the site-specifc installation of Venice in any other place, in its perpetual “Reinvigoration”.

SUNSERIF (2) :

Sunserif takes its name from a play on words: where the term “Sans serif ” used to define a particular type of typeface literally “without grace” is replaced by the word “Sun serif ” which is pronounced almost in the same way but the meaning changes with “Graceful Sun” referring to the play of transparency given by the semitransparent curtains of the work.

Sunserif is presented as an industrial curtain for the separation of the environments, anchored to the ceiling by means of a metal anchor, it is composed of 40 strips of transparent vinyl plastic worn by time and dust, opaque by volatile materials.

Sunserif is composed of 40 strips of transparent vinyl plastic, a plastic / transparent structure about the size of (8 mx 3m) used for the separation of the industrial environments of the Allufer Tempesta shipyard, here, the plastic strips have absorbed over the years : dust, minerals and degradation so that the transparent hygienic plastic has taken on an almost organic semi-transparent appearance.

On these, as for the partial cleaning procedure used on the marble of “Zio Bartoluccio” we will work by subtraction eliminating according to a predefined shape the negative out line of “Uncle Bartoluccio” immersed in his new residence of Forte Marghera (fig.1) returning so on the stripes, as already happened on the bust, the bi-temporal trace between: past and present, organic and inorganic, continuous and immobile.

Sunserif is a coagulating element of the exhibition and will position itself in the exhibition spaces that will host the second phase of Reinvigorito and will dialogue with the other elements that make up the installation.