Daniele D’Acquisto — Forming — 22,48 m² Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 13 → July 31, 2015

Daniele D’Acquisto often operates on the border between project and vision, in a meditation process that questions spaces and their limits, renews objects and structures, gives other playback options for environments which he decides to act.

For the exhibition Forming, set of his latest works, he develops his work on different independent but related fronts : photographic prints on aluminum and in-situ installations, precarious works designed for 22.48 m².

Daniele D’Acquisto recently moved to northern Italy and repatriated all he kept in his studio in Taranto, a town in the South. For a long time, the artist had accumulated a messy set of more or less ordinary objects, intrigued by their shape, anonymous or banal story, rather than their practical use in everyday life.

His new studio was well populated with a variety of objects and materials, which in the general chaos were identified and arranged by the artist on a large wall, then photographed and printed on aluminum. A tire, an ax, an open book, etc : dynamics through which they were placed on the wall surface are varied, but in all cases comply with studied nomenclature that takes into account not functional but formal relationship.

Each time, on the walls of his studio and therefore on photographic prints presented at the gallery, there is an object that becomes the spatial base from which develops a new coordinates system, autonomous and simultaneously connected to the original object through paintings on the wall.

Daniele D'acquisto, Forming L (n°2), 2015 Peinture à la bombe, objets, Œuvre in situ — Dimensions variables Courtesy of the artist & Galerie 22,48 m², Paris

The title Forming refers to the fact that the work coincides with the training process also referring to the title — GI — an old album of Germs, american punk-rock band. This group proposes on this album twice the same piece of music entitled Forming. The first version is played when the group took over the instruments without yet having acquired the mastery of the score, the second was recorded after some time when technical knowledge is matched with the expressive urgency. This duality is also true in the work of Daniele D’Acquisto : installations photographed in his studio as the first time of his new research and installations showed in the gallery. With these prints on aluminum, it’s not purely documentary images, but the result of the work that takes the characteristics of a moving object, a frame.

D’Acquisto built this work through an ecological process of the reuse of the current situation. Even though for various reasons, this method of “recycling” is common to several artists who were active in recent years, and is related in some way to an experimental nature, but also recovery of forms and materials that belong to our history. This explains some re-modulations whose roots must be found in the field of Arte Povera and other experimental researchs in Europe and America in the 60’s and 70’s. D’Acquisto ‘s approach is clearly mental before to be operational and manual. The curator Alberto Zanchetta has written that :

“For years, the artist has kept on questioning himself about the liminal space that separates what is real (the physical phenomenon analyzed by science) from what is ideal (the imagination, as used by art). In other words, the artist aims at transposing concepts into objects, through a seamless juxtaposition of the phenomenal and neurological plane, given that the same brain areas are activated when we imagine and when we see things”.