Galleria Umberto Di Marino is happy to announce the opening, on Monday October 3rd 2022, of Casa Di Marino, the new exhibition space of Naples in via Monte di Dio 9. The new space is born out of the necessity to concentrate the history and energy of the gallery into a new dimension, very tied to the personal vision of the gallerist. With a “return to the origins,” Casa Di Marino represents that combination of domestic and working spaces that had already been partially present in the first years of activity of the gallery in Giugliano in Campania.
The visitors will be invited to dialogue not just with an exhibition space, but they will be surrounded by the dynamics of a household that has always existed around the attempt to find its own way to narrate contemporaneity.
Things that are usually hidden or private while running the business will become crucial aspects of the experience and everyday life of the gallery, and in that way the office, the storage, and the library simultaneously will be the kitchen, dining room, living room, and terrace. The invitation to enter a private space wants to stimulate the visitor into committing their attention in front of a more in-depth perspective and to develop a new interest in regard to the different approaches of artistic production. Placing itself as a sort of collective space, a common good, the new Casa Di Marino will be available to whoever wants to study and research the almost 30 years of activity of the Umberto Di Marino gallery and all the artists, curators, and various characters who have passed through, enriched and regenerated it; a space to discover a new use, slower and less dispersive approach to contemporary art.
The new path starts with the opening of the personal exhibition of Carlos Amorales titled Artists of the world, unite! The work of the Mexican artist is based around the exploration, through a multitude of media like video, painting, installation, performance, drawing, and prints, of the limits of predefined categories such as communication and language, constantly looking for a re-imagination and re-structuring of these models. From the 90s, Amorales has attempted to construct actual realities where the common human perception can be placed under discussion. The invention of a both fictitious and collective identity in the Wrestler Amorales; the alphabetic code of a language done in abstract shapes, like in the project Life in the Folds; all show a radical interest towards the different methodologies of representation of human identity. Through fragmented and irrational narrations, Carlos Amorales focuses the attention unto the artifice that comes into place trying to hide one’s “inner self”, trying to develop an analysis on multiple layers that lie between the most private aspect of the self and the otherness, between the private and the public sphere of an individual.
This is where the exhibition Artists of the world, unite! takes its inspiration; from the idea that when a person draws a portrait, they are always drawing themselves. Experimenting with a generative adversarial network (GAN) program, an AI that generates images from text descriptions, Amorales tries to entrust the machine with representing extremely personal and metaphysical concepts, such as the “inner self.” The result is an impressive series of fragmented faces, defined by few and simple lines, almost as if they are uncanny resembling well known historical paintings. Since these faces are basically self-portraits, they ontologically represent the most private part of the self, this time generated casually by AI.
By putting these Umberto Di Marino representations into paper, Amorales starts a new narration, where subjects that have never existed get mixed into layers that are both personal and collective, real and fictitious, eroding the dual dialogue of these conceptual spheres and opening the door to an almost mystical dimension where aspects of the Neapolitan spirituality tie themselves with Mexican culture.
Like in the cult of the anime pezzentelle, entities without names are curated, given meaning, and finally represented, gaining consistency and – leaving behind the characteristics of bidimensional artwork – they become illuminous icons for the passage between purgatory and paradise. Both mortal and divine they produce the iconodulia for the inner self.
Exhibition: Artists of the world, unite! Carlos Amorales.
Exhibition duration: 3d October 2022 – 30 November 2022
Opening hours: Monday – Friday at 11.00 – 13.00 / 15.00 – 19.00
Address and contact:
Casa Di Marino
Via Monte di Dio, 9, 80132 – Naples
www.galleriaumbertodimarino.com
Carlos Amorales (born in Mexico City in 1970) studied visual art in the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and in the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He has done Artist Residences in the Atelier Calder en Saché (2012) and MAC/VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine (2011) in France, and as part of the program of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington (2010), United States. The works of research that connect his work are: Los Amorales (1996-2001), Liquid Archive (1999-2010), Nuevos Ricos (2004-2009) alongside an on-going typographical exploration in collaboration with cinematic language (2013-today). Among his multiple personal exhibitions we can list: The Factory, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2019-2020); Axioms for Action, MUAC, UNAM (Mexico city, Mexico, 2018) and MARCO (Monterrey, Mexico, 2019); Working Tools, MAMM, (Medellin, Colombia 2017); Anti Tropicalia, Museo de Arte y Diseño (San José, Costa Rica, 2015); Black Cloud, Power Plant, (Toronto, Canada, 2015); El Esplendor Geométrico, Kurimanzutto (Mexico City, Mexico, 2015), Germinal, Museo Tamayo (Mexico City, Mexico, 2013); Nuevos Ricos, Kunsthalle Fridericianum (Kassel, Germany, 2010); Four Animations, Five Drawings and a Plague, Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, United States, 2008); Discarded Spider, Cincinnati Art Center (Cincinnati, United States, 2008). Some of his most important group exhibitions include: Under the Same Sun. Art From Latin America Today, Guggenheim Museum (New York, United States, 2014); New Perspectives in Latin American Art, MoMA (New York, United States, 2007); Mexico City: An Exhibition About the Exchange Rate of Bodies and Values, MoMA PS1 (New York, United States, 2002); and performances such as Amorales vs. Amorales, at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France, 2001), SF MoMA (San Francisco, United States, 2003) and Tate Modern (London, England, 2003). Furthermore, he represented Mexico in the 57th Biennale di Venezia with the project Life in the Folds, and the Netherlands for the same Biennale in 2003. He has also participated in biennials such as Manifesta 9 (Belgium, 2012), Biennale de la Habana (Cuba, 2015 y 2009), Performa (United States, 2007), Berlin Biennial (Germany, 2001 and 2014), Manifd’Art 8: The Québec Biennale (Canada, 2017). His work is present in international collections such as the Museo Tamayo and the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Tate Modern, London; MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; among others.