Yarisal & Kublitz
“You knew it and you blew it”
Enrico Fornello Gallery is honored to present the first solo show of the Swiss-Danish artistic duo Yarisal & Kublitz.
Despite their youth (both artists are still not 30 years old) these artists can already boast of two solo shows at a JLV Gallery in London (in 2003 and 2004); a Danish prize “Diesel New Art” for sculpture in 2005; a participation at “The Building Show”, group show at Exit Art in New York in 2007; and an upcoming solo show at Kunstverein in Weisbaden (Germany, 27th April – 8th June 2008).
For the exhibition in Prato the SPAZIO P21 of the Fornello Gallery is fully engaged with two principal installations, created specifically for this exhibition, a video and one more work on the wall.
The red line connecting the four works, is the artists’ willingness to create “visual metaphors” of simple everyday situations using elementary objects (wooden boards, balloons, electric wires) that often stage tragicomic events.
In case of the principal structure, a series of non inflated balloons are attached to a serpentine which is leading them into a glass box where each one of them will be inflated to become a beautiful red balloon. Though their destiny is already inevitably defined by a sting positioned at the top of a box that will mercilessly puncture one by one at the moment of their full expansion.
Apart from the obvious reference to fragility and caducity of elements, for instance beauty or love (connecting to the balloons), this installation raises other less obvious aspects: for example people’s usually tragic inability of handling, evading or intervention in the everyday flow of things. The public actually in relation to the objects takes a double role of both active and passive subject: on one hand the spectators are invited to interact (starting the devices or finding themselves as protagonists of the actions that will later become the object of a video); on the other hand once the mechanisms have been activated, the spectator is completely deprived of any further possibility of intervention or control, becoming passive (like for the balloons blowing up and explosing inside the plexiglass box).
The strength of their works lies in the artists’ capacity in reinterpretation and translation, with great irony, of small-great everyday events with very simple gestures (or mechanisms) that manage to disclose some of our anxieties, or phobias of our contemporary frenetic living. Like in the video here presented, where an apparently hysterical gesture of the artist (that deliberately throws a vase from a shelf), causes an automatic transfer of some papers from the floor into the dust bin. Artistic revalidation of the third principle of dynamics (“every action has an exactly opposite reaction”) or a modern version of “not all evil is made to hurt”? The public will judge.
