Unstable condition at Triangolo

Unstable Condition emerges not from a theme, but from meeting the artists’ works. More than formal affinities, it registers the artwork’s necessity to come into the world and remain permeable to it. The medium endlessly overwrites itself, returning to the syntagm, working in backlight, oscillating between apparition and super- structure. Six works for six practices.

I would describe Federico Cantale’s sculpture as a restless gesture. A precipitate of light and colour, of materialbefore matter, it plays with reference itself. Inside the bulk of a dormant, placid creature, Cantale’s sculpture is in fibrillation: it hints at tautology, but by way of a riddle. It proposes an idea of sculpture that fragments the viewpoint: on the one hand, an axonometric impulse, a volume that occupies and unsettles space, even at a virtual level; on the other, a compositional logic that emerges precariously from a frontal view. There is no painterly unconscious at work here, but rather a Baroque pleasure – not in style, but in premise – in sculpture’s own enchantment. In daylight and in the night’s domain of form, Cantale’s sculpture becomes wave, nimbus, side.

Erasmia Kadinopoulou’s work unfolds through the straification of things as much as through their interstices. Her practice seems suspended in air and ether: at once sculpture and the environment it recalibrates; lightthat informs volume and the slow, tenacious shifting of its appearance; an objet trouvé, a primordial device held together with obstinate precision. Above all, a body that performs objecthood. Indeed, there is a pervasive electronic charge in Kadinopoulou’s artefacts. A voltage  less about technology than mystery and familiarity, a tangible impulse woven through the breath of elements, intergenerational memory, and passages across infrastructures. A synchronicity of desire runs through them: temporality, and continually renegotiate our proximity to signs that are at once known and unfathomably remote.

With ghostly discretion, Chris Zhongtian Yuan inhabits the layered intersection of biographical and collective memory, tracing the processes through which remembrance becomes narrative. Mystification, even. His practice stages an intertextual logic: it oscillates between the animated register of the moving image and the emergence of a miniature, childlike constellation of 3D-printed models, characters and props that inhabit the image itself, crushing the distance between production and the imagination. Sneaking off the screen and slipping quietly into the world, these surrogates become projections and mirages: like memories nestled within the subconscious and almost forgotten, they appear stripped bare. Childhood is their formal as much as conceptual panorama. Perhaps there exists a stylistic principle capable of reifying a dissonant moment, as if virtually grasped (Wuhan, the 1990s).

Alex Thake stages the infinite accidents of perception, dressing them in a provisional, essential guise. Of these accidents, the artist produces a precarious phenomenology, an economy of affects, activated through close-up vision: a taxonomy of perspectives rather than places, in which the modulation of light produces an atmosphere that signals a precarious condition – at once human, infrastructural, socio-economic. Neither sculpture nor architecture nor set design, her practice treats miniaturisation not as possession or control, but as a device that mesmerises the standpoint on things, becoming the field onto which regimes of visibility and invisibility fold. In Thake’s work a residual minimalism persists, precipitated into the blunt finiteness, at times elegiac, of the real: the cube, relinquishing its self-referential transparency, bears the latent burden of a resemantised Frankfurt interior.

James Sibley’s work enters the medium of sculpture by straining its partial identification with furniture and the ordinary object. Reframing and decontextualising across space as much as stereotype, it puts the body into play while colliding with perceptual and cultural conventions. Sibley’s practice seems oriented by a combinatory impulse towards reiteration, triggering a destabilisation that becomes almost particulate. An impulse framed by a latent doubleness: modular duplicity, the fiction of luxury, and the pleasure of class assertion. His sculptural modules wander, looming as symbols (and symptoms) of the English class system. Breaking free from their object-bound condition, they also live in a distinctly pictorial register. Glimmering out of darkness, they stand out as timeless, screen-like apparitions, fatally brushing the viewer with the seduction of ex-commodities.

Giacomo Montanelli’s painting is realist. A distillation of formal thinking that lies behind things, his images resemble sleepwalking intuitions and the epiphanies of the secondary. Transparent, they stand against the horizon at the threshold of hallucination. They are geometry, and the feeling of geometry: a grammar of the sign and landscape. In Montanelli’s work conveys a fierce inevitability of composition and to its meaning: a poetic articulation of how things inhabit the space of representation across an infinite plane. Yet there is also pleasure in the play of roles, in failure as principle, in the vertigo of history. In backlight, the doorman watches images behind his eyelids. He is a juggler of forms and concierge of enigma: a tightly balanced tightrope walker, Montanelli orchestrates lemmas and pursues omens.

- Valentina Bartalesi