Renée van Trier
Drawing: Apparently it is about land
Charchoal, paper
23,7 x 32 cm
Courtesy the artist
Photo credit: Sofie Boon

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH RENÉE VAN TRIER

“THIS AIN’T DISNEYLAND
NO CARTOON CHARACTERS HERE
NO PRINCESSES WHO SAVE THE DAY
JUST STRUGGLES AND LONELINESS IN OUR WAY
BEING EXCLUDED IS THE WORST THING TO HAPPEN
EMPATHY IS HARD WORK
EMPATHY IS PAINFULL
LESS AND LESS ROOM FOR ANIMALS TO CHASE
LESS AND LESS ROOM TO CALL HOME
WE FELL ON DEAF EARS
WE TAKE MORE THAN WHAT WE NEED
NATURE HAS THE LAST LAUGH
YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO RETURN TO YOUR ORIGINAL STATE”

“I WANT THE BEST FOR MY CHILDREN”

Alessandro Pessoli
The Valley, 2021
Oil, acrylic, spray paint, oil stick, oil pastels, and colored pencil on canvas
88 5/8 x 169 1/4 inches (225 x 430 cm)
Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery New York

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH ALESSANDRO PESSOLI

A world fades within one that begins, the sun is a gearwheel that extinguishes itself, dragging a headless body, an old hero from whom flowers are born.
Two creatures, a little boy on the back of an invented tiger and my hands, not much more than a small blue tree to lean on.
In the future my face is like a flaming skull with a burning smile on which a cartoon worm walks and a little flower sprouts.

Fabrizio Prevedello
Prove di volo (35)
2009
Steel
14,5×44,5×42 cm
Courtesy Cardelli & Fontana

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH FABRIZIO PREVEDELLO

The studio is an old abandoned house.

In the seventies it was also used as an elementary school in the small village where I live.

It has a terracotta floor supported by chestnut beams. The floor is very elastic, maybe too much… I reinforce it with a beam. My colleague downstairs, a painter, is grateful to me.

To distribute the weights, the materials for the sculptures are placed around the perimeter of the walls. I also started building the sculptures on the walls.

The climate is mild, for almost the whole year I leave the windows open, the swallows come in, they make their nests between the beams in the ceiling… and their physical needs, too.

I cover the finished sculptures with sheets, I protect them from being looked at and from coexistence with the swallows.

A sculpture in the making is positioned very high up, just below the ceiling. Some newborn swallows begin to use it as a springboard.

Chiara Enzo
Situazione con M.
2023
19 x 26 cm
Acquerello, pastello, matite colorate su cartoncino incollato su tavola
Courtesy l’Artista; Zero…, Milano
© Chiara Enzo

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH CHIARA ENZO

The body mixed with itself and with another (or with others), with itself as with the other, does not enter into an identification or in a confusion, but in a disturbing proximity because it itself is proximity, an approach to a certain distinction and renewal, repetition and rekindling of the gap where the pleasure consists in tasting the measure forever uncertain, ephemeral and trembling. Touching: that is, making attraction and repulsion play together, integrity and break-in, distinction and translation. Making the whole play as such, i.e. the touch of unity and of its detachment, of its disunity.

Jean-Luc Nancy, Il corpo dell’arte

Kaarina Kaikkonen
I was trying to organize my life
2017
Mixed media
Courtesy the Artist and Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH KAARINA KAIKKONEN

Sometimes and quite often actually there is a heavy feeling coming that tells me that all the things around me are in such a mess and it is hard to control things. I am not very well organized as a person.
Even if I try to organize everything, very soon all is mixed up again. I would love to be a person who can organize everything and keep all the things and surroundings in a beautiful order. I would love to be a better person who can help the whole world to be better.
But unfortunately, it seems that I cannot be that person.

Domenico Antonio Mancini
La periferia vi guarda con odio
2019
Red neon 250 cm, 8 mm neon tube
Courtesy of Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan – Naples
Photo credits Danilo Donzelli

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH DOMENICO ANTONIO MANCINI

When, during the first days of high school, the teacher asked us what we liked about going to high school, which was a decidedly bourgeois institution in the historic center of Naples, completely misunderstanding the meaning of the question asked, I replied that I loved the journey. The journey that started from the eastern suburbs, the city that changed throughout the battered buses’ windows of the Napoli’s “far east”, that told me about the change in a visual and social landscape that fascinated me. Years later, on a wall in Milan, I found the same voice again, and I thought that collecting and reshaping those voices could bring them to the “centers” of the world.

Francesca Ferreri
Fino al sole
2021
Aper mache, wood, sand, glue, galvanized iron mesh, consolidated plaster, jesmonite, pigments, electrical material, low voltage light bulb.

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH FRANCESCA FERRERI

«If I get close it vanishes, the top swings
the weather. I will meditate on the movement
for a long time that pours its robbery into me». Thus was born,
shield of nothing, in glory

but from the top that swings to the nothing shield,
bells, the torment of finding each other
still out and in, not to be there
that in glory of an invention of the wind
swollen, the slow shine that makes matter.

Silvia Bre, The Bells, G. Einaudi editore

Eugenio Tibaldi
HABITAT 03
2023
Site specific installation
Mumbai art Week

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH EUGENIO TIBALDI

…Claudia said: ‘But Mrs Frankweiler, one should want to learn something new every day. We also learned it at the museum’.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I don’t agree. I think you have to learn, of course, and some days you have to learn a lot. But on some days you also have to let what we already have inside penetrate so that it touches everything. And we can feel it inside of us. If you don’t let that happen, then you just accumulate the facts, and sooner or later they will start tinkling inside of you. You can make noise with it, but you will never feel anything, only emptiness.”…

From: Fuga al museo
di E.L. Konigsburg
ed. Salani Gl’Istrici

Nicola Samorì
Campo dei miracoli
2022
Oils on paper applied on linen
500 x 800 cm
Courtesy Galerie EIGEN+ART Leipzig/Berlin
Photo Rolando Paolo Guerzoni

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH NICOLA SAMORÌ

Ninety-nine words made me think of ninety-nine bodies and ninety-nine days, just over three months, the period of time during which my most complex work created in 2022 took shape: “Campo dei miracoli” (“Field of miracles”).
It is in this five by eight meter frame that rest perhaps ninety-nine – I have never counted them – bodies, a sort of derailed cataloging. Over eight years of accumulation to form what appears to be the bed of a dry river from which stones, vegetables and figures emerge.
Returning to the initial ninety-nine words, nine are missing: here they are.

Patrick Tuttofuoco
OUT OF BODY
2022
Polished and painted stainless steel, Portogallo pink marble
Courtesy Nilufar Galley, Schiavo Zoppelli Gallery

THE BLANK CONTEMPORARY ART
99 WORDS WITH PATRICK TUTTOFUOCO

The expression OUT OF BODY indicates those experiences in which one perceives to “go out” of their physical body, projecting their own consciousness beyond bodily boundaries. We often speak of a journey of the soul, considered capable of freeing itself from the snares of the body where the purpose of this experience is to acquire a greater certainty of one’s spiritual reality. Such practices recur for example in Egyptian mythology, in the Pythagorean doctrine of Plato and the Neoplatonists, in Pliny the Elder, and in the general literature of visionary of various religious, spiritual and esoteric currencies, concerning projections or perceptual shifts in other dimensions of space and time.
These reflections serve as a prerequisite for starting a practice that sees objects as extensions of the body and as a possibility to perceive the creative experience not only through the direct relationship with the material, but as an evolution and extension of thought. If the human body can be experienced as a tool to achieve new visions of the world then, in a logic of transformation, it can even become itself the matter of the project.