Athanasios Argianas / Sophie Bueno-Boutellier / Giulio Frigo

febbruary 10- march 27, 2010

Cometa Rossa (Red Comet) is a group show that investigates magnetic fields, forces and the imperceptible dynamics of the exhibition space.

The exhibition takes its name from a popular Greek song, a tongue twister probably used by the pagan priests, repeated in psalmodies. The Fluxus artist, phonetic researcher and singer Demetrio Stratos, has analysed the syntax and rhythm of this phoneme which speaks of the cicada and its double. The sounds emitted by these insects were probably once seen as a manifestation of the divine in the real world.

The studies on the use of voice that Stratos has applied in Cometa Rossa are an almost empirical and palpable explanation of sound as mass, the wave and the flux that propagates in space as an emotional form in perpetual movement.

An exhibition is essentially a field of forces in a determined space. Cometa Rossa attempts to analyse the rhythms that exist between things, with the awareness of how the positioning of a work of art is an important element of the work, and how, on final analysis, an exhibition is a form in itself, a ‘new spatiality’, unknown until recently, and reproducible in infinitely small scale, in incredibly huge and theoretically infinite cosmic spaces.

Within this logic, the gallery becomes a dramatic grotto, a place where sound, expression, form, velocity and attraction are merely the perceivable side of an essentially spiritual governed by the laws of physics.

The works in the exhibition space reveal their symbolic potential, they become mere images that can be ‘taken away’ by the spectator, and in a sort of telepathic transmission, through the intermediate passage to concrete form, they pass from being an idea in the artist’s mind to an idea in the mind of the viewer.

The insertion of objects in the show, like a small magnet that repels the vector fields, the cosmic maps of the Swiss healer Emma Kunz, or Maria Thun’s studies of the sea, providing an expansive interpretational key of time and other dimensions of the exhibition space.

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Athanasios Argianas

1976 Born in Athens, Greece.
Has recently exhibited in solo shows at the Max Wigram Gallery and Arcade Fine Arts, Serpentine Gallery in London; L’Arquebuse in Geneva and in group shows at Manifesto Marathon, curated by Hans Hurlich Obrist at the Serpentine Gallery, London; Deste Foundation and the 2nd Athens Biennial, Greece.
Currently lives and works in London.

Sophie Bueno-Boutellier

1974 Born in Toulouse, France.
The artist has recently worked on projects at Circus, Berlin; Galerie Carlos Cardenas, Paris; Chert, Berlin; Groupe Galeries Lafayette, Paris; Galerie Air de Paris, Paris and Fondation d’entreprise Ricard pour l’art contemporain, Paris.
Currently living and working in Berlin.

Giulio Frigo

1984 Born in Arzignano, Italy.
Frigo has recently taken part in group shows at Form Content in London; Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice; Brown Project Space, Milan; Strozzina in Florence, based on a proposal by Andrea Bellini.
Currently living and working in Milan.