Lascio il nulla a nessuno
Davide La Montagna
September 13 - 21, 2018
@
ALMANAC INN
Via Reggio 13, 10153
Turin, Italy
Lascio il nulla a nessuno is the first solo exhibition by Davide La Montagna (b. 1992, Rivoli), part of the programme at ALMANAC INN dedicated to show the artistic practice of young Italian artists.
La Montagna’s research explores the ambiguity and difference between sentimental and romantic. Their discrepancy is based on different assumptions on the finitude and durability of an experience. The possibility of their endurance, holding on to time, and the certainty of a fleeting event, clung to the present. La Montagna’s practice investigates these temporalities navigating through the melancholic and the pathetic, the emotional and the sensitive.
His work talks about something without naming or showing it, but just suggesting or recalling. It exceeds the field of vision, renouncing to its control, to favor its transient nature in the present.
The works presented are configured as traces of an experience, questioning its memory and stating the impossibility of grasping its totality. The minimal gestures and the economy of the materials used in the works mark a fragile division between presence and absence. A series of monochromes are stretched from fabrics chosen for their natural tones, greens and pink. Sensorial leftovers of a reminiscence infused with essences. Small boxes left on the floor are hiding their content, precious for its secrecy. These works are clinically titled after the fragrance archiving code of the scents that they diffuse - C3, B8, A1, A2 - almost refusing to unveil the organic and vulnerable elements used and sacrificed in their extraction. The works leave space to perception, a sensation of time. 50 crushed pink roses and orchids embody a process of time consumption, dispelling the fetish for the preservation of beauty, but praising uniqueness and fragility. A memento of the ephemeral nature of our sensorial experiences. The works reflect the interactions and collisions between phenomena, memory and their abstraction. The minimal features of the works bringing into account the participation of the viewer in its fruition draw attention to the intimate relationship between time and subjectivity. Their nature as image and representation involves a presence, both of the subject and the object. Praes-entia: being in front. Revealing a reality of a moment, the essence of its immediacy. Here the duplicity of a presence in an absence: the ephemerality of experience. What consciousness cannot formulate but forgets in order to constitute itself in the moment. Talking about the nature of an image Nancy describes representation being constituted by the relation between presence and absence, which breaths, holds itself, is emptied, coming into live. A beauty, as Plato says, that will not be revealed by a face, or an hand, or anything else corporeal.
