TORINO, ITALY.-Michael Beutler’s second personal exhibition (Oldenburg 1976, lives and works in Berlin) at Franco Soffiantino’s art gallery is an architectural project laid out on both levels of the gallery by means of two different installations, especially designed for the exhibition and put in relation between one another. The first, Up, is a superelevated metallic structure that runs across all the rooms of the ground floor, shaping itself in perfect harmony with the dimensions of the area. The work has indeed been tailor-made for the gallery, thus reproposing its features and planimetric proportions. Like a skeletal cast or a paradoxical reproduction in 1:1 scale hosted within its areas, Up reproduces the morphology of the gallery in all its details, transforming its areas and rooms into a geometrically essential architecture. However, the installation is assembled through segments that can be modulated between one another, maintaining a formal autonomy of their own. The artist thus reveals the potential fickleness of architectures and structures, suggesting the hypothesis of a radical instability that can cross every type of area and architectural handiwork.

The basement level of the gallery hosts Down, an installation path that shows how in Beutler’s activity the final work is only the last element of an entire analysis process, translated into manual ability, on the architectural specificities of the areas where he intervenes. Organised with a consequential logic through the rooms and directly created in the gallery, the resulting modular structure is also a hypothesis of redesign of the entire area, where the simplicity of the elements used, paper and bamboo, is accompanied by the usual strategy of improvisation and planning that feeds the artist’s entire work.

Shapes, dimensions and minimal materials thus give the impression of a structural subversion, transmitted through a playful and fantastic atmosphere, almost a visual symphony of colours and light architectures.