MILAN.- Massimo De Carlo is presenting Charivari, a solo show by the Swiss artist John Armleder, that brings a new body of works and site specific installations in the gallery’s spaces of Via Ventura.
John Armleder’s universe stems into the irony and freedom that characterized the Fluxus movement. Through his stylistic and lexical breadth the artist creates a whimsical and glittering universe studded by multiform works that play with the boundaries between art and design, figuration and abstraction. The artist’s practice, which is a combination of smart and cultured irony paired with a fascination for the world of glamour and entertainment, eludes any possible definition. The Swiss artists’ practice is continuously changing: as for real life, everything flows naturally from one shape to the other.
With Charivari John Armleder presents a new series of eclectic and mysterious works, firstly by their nature, and secondly by the process through which they were made: these works synthesize the artists long exhibiting career. In the first room of the gallery John Armleder pays homage to the exhibition Horizon Home Sweet Home by James Rosenquist that took place at Leo Castelli’s gallery in 1970. Just as it happened then, the viewer is projected into a futuristic environment. Rhythmic installations composed by LED lights, the melody of Blue Danube Waltz in the piano version by Josef Lhevinne, fills the room whilst playing at different speeds together with smoke machines: all these elements play a key part in creating a mysterious and surreal landscape that feels almost suspended. Black and gold canvases, of different shapes and sizes, emerge from this whimsical scenery, seeming to imitate an imaginary idea of perspective or a small detail of an unknown geometric reality. The exhibition is like a series of short stories that allude to the artist’s relationship with the city of Milan: inspiring shapes and titles of the works in the show always remain mysterious and indecipherable.
In the second room of the gallery there is a new group of Furniture Sculptures – installations juxtaposed to furniture, design objects, musical instruments and abstract paintings - transform the gallery into an extravagant domestic universe. Here we find bizarre compositions where each of us can project imaginary lives suspended between the order of reality and the chaos of dreams.
The second floor of the gallery is an explosion of colors: the walls and floors of the room are traced with moonscapes, primordial soups and imaginary biologies. John Armleder’s new Puddle Paintings, take shape as the artists pours paint on the canvases from above, are generated by Armleder’s collaboration with chance: glitter, unusual objects, small rubber animals and various decorations become trapped in the dense threads of paint transforming, with a touch of kitsch, the flat surfaces of the canvases explode with live material.
