Contemporary Cluster #08 - Joe Clarke, Massimo Piersanti, Olivier de Sagazan. Beauty and Brutalism

On the occasion of the fourth group of exhibitions that closes the 2017-2018 season, Contempoarary Cluster is pleased to present to the public Contemporary Cluster # 08 feat. Joe Clarke, Massimo Piersanti, Olivier de Sagazan. 

Exhibitions open Saturday 12th May, 2018 at 6.20 pm.

Beauty and Brutalism is the topic chosen for the new core of exhibitions at Palazzo Cavallerini Lazzaroni. The concepts of Beauty and Brutality will be compared and related to the works of three artists belonging to three different generations, who have developed their research through the use of diversified means of expression. Joe Clarke, a young British artist at his first Italian solo show, Massimo Piersanti, internationally renowned photographer who has documented the most prolific artistic season since the Seventies on, Olivier de Sagazan the famous French performer portrayed in a series of shots made by Didier Carluccio and protagonist of the sensational performance titled Transfiguration, which will take place at the Contemporary Cluster on Saturday 19 May 2018, at 6.30 pm.

The three new exhibition projects, expressly conceived for the gallery, will declare the ambiguity of the concepts of beauty and brutality developing a reflection that raises from architectural and visual experiences to those related to performance and body art – Brutalist architecture, expressive languages linked to the use of raw materials, performance linked to the body as a field of strong symbolic actions.

Joe Clarke conducts an eclectic research that easily crosses historic avant-garde movements and makes them his own. From Constructivism to the Bauhaus, up to the Brutalist Architecture, the artist is able to express a multiplicity of languages and visual media that are transposed within a postmodern, sharp, conflicting dimension. Industrial steel sculptures, video installations and canvases demonstrate the coexistence of interest in urban cultures and industrialization processes, together with a marked attitude to return reality without mediation, in a direct and violent way.

In the series shot by Massimo Piersanti, one of the most influential Italian photographers in Italy and abroad, the six megalithic installations by Giovanni Anselmo, Christian Boltanski, Richard Long, Mario Merz , Ulrich Rückriem become places of primitive and post-atomic living.

Olivier de Sagazan conducts a hybrid practice focused on the contamination between painting, photography, sculpture and performance. On the occasion of the opening, the gallery shows to the public a selection of nine shots made by Didier Carluccio who portrays de Sagazan during some of the most significant moments of Transfiguration. In his performance, created since 1998, staged several times and reinterpreted in recent years, de Sagazan overlaps layers of clay and color on his face and on his body to transform, disfigure, reshape his image, revealing a hybrid humanity and grotesque, halfway between human and animal.

Three exhibitions, three artists that investigate the combination of beauty and brutality in a transversal way and through different expressive instruments.

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