Luciano Andreani

               

Luciano Andreani is an Italian Artist based in Bern. He was here working for a month in an artists studio / apartment. During his stay, he was indeed very busy working on a collection of heads, masks and figures predominantly constructed using rubber inner tubes and assorted materials and objects.

The work was hand made and often fastened with staples, hence the witty and understated title of the show. Luciano's big hands belie the fact that the works were all finely realised in detail and invention. His background is also in the theatre and his drawings which were not on show reveal strange encounters with a staged presence. He asked at one point if the work seemed to reference the votive African arts maybe too much and in some ways this might be the case but we also encountered a cast of other beings that inhabit the Bosch paintings that we took the time to visit. Lurking in the shadows at the uncanny edge of the European medieval tradition, devilish and gargoyled spirits show us the way to hell and beyond to our very own nightmares, outrageously mingling with our hopes and dreams. He added Ensor to that group as well. In our discussions we also referenced artists working with transforming the throw away culture and mass produced objects and discarded materials that we are encountering in the borderless terrain of folk art, craft and contemporary artistic languages, present in international events. 

The mask and the detached head is a significant ritual and performative device and has to be imbued with the makers prowess and particular idea of what becomes enacted at the boundaries of the hidden and revealed, what is transmitted when identity is both denied and re-invented, misconstrued to put you off the track, or simply conveyed as the horror. Transformed for both good and bad, who will know how to tell the difference, the enlightened or the damned? Luciano knows there is no light without the darkness and the soft rubbery surfaces with colourful implants are also uncomfortable. If the enticing and sometimes gently bloated forms, padded and stuffed might be aesthetically entrancing, they were equally disturbing when caught at a glance or direct eye to eye contact.

Maybe he is returning to work here again at the end of the year. Andreani agrees that to work here is exceptionally good and the atmosphere of the street, the community and the city provides the multiple layerings of experience that have propelled the work at such a rate. The show was a one nighter, and produced in the best spirit of 'exhibition', that is to show what has been done, what is going on and not in this instance as part of a bigger institutional process. This was small scale, local and spontaneous enough to be a pleasure to engage with at close hand.    

 

More images to follow