Giuseppe Chiari — Tornabuoni Art — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: July 10 → September 30, 2015

Tornabuoni Art presents for the first time in its Parisian space, the work of Action Music pioneer Giuseppe Chiari (Florence, 1926-2007), one of the main Italian members of the neo-Dada artistic movement Fluxus.

With forty works chosen between the 1960s and 1990s, the exhibition outlines the career of Giuseppe Chiari, who was known among the contemporary avant-garde, for his musical performances in which he deviates instruments from their original function and re-appropriates himself objects normally linked to day-to-day life. Influenced by Bruitism and Futurist theatre, he developed a musical language no longer limited to the scales and sounds emitted by musical instruments, but that integrates all the noises of everyday life: « a single sound is music », writes Chiari (Fantamusicologia, 1998).

In his work, the artist puts into question the fragmentation of the arts, which he judges artificial and contradictory. The sheet music exhibited at the Tornabuoni Art gallery is witness to an interpretative action of music. It offers a spontaneous, intuitive, multi-sensorial, or even synesthetic interpretation of the music it describes, gesturally activated through sight rather than hearing. Chiari thus rids himself of traditional media for musical expression, proving that gouache can convey it as well as a piano.

In line with Fluxus poetics, Chiari produces collages and experiments, all the while engaging with day-to-day life and current events. Alongside phrases like humorous haikus, the exhibited works illustrate Fluxus’ anti-definition of art: neither as artifice, because they use sub or un-conscious human interactions; nor as non-functional leisure, because they work with science and communication; nor as culture, because they include gags, games and wordplay.

Tornabuoni Art thus presents the work of a composer, philosopher and conceptual artist exploring and working beyond the boundaries of art.