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New Wave
Personal exhibition of
Benoît Barbagli
Commissioner: Enrico Debandi
Opening on Thursday, April 7 at 6pm
Exhibition from April 8 to May 21
Open from Wednesday to Saturday from 4pm to 7pm
Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana
Via della Consolata, 1 bis – Turin , Italy
Tel: +39 347 010 3021
E-mail: eventi@palazzopaesana.it
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The health pass is not mandatory to enter the exhibition.
A health pass or negative test (<48h) is required to cross the border.
On the evening of the opening, access to the exhibition will be conditional on registration.
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Reservation of a room in Turin near the exhibition:
Allegroitalia Golden Palace 5⭐
To reserve write to receptiongolden@allegroitalia.it with the promotional code Nouvelle Vague
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As certain as a wave washing up on the shore announces the next one, the New Wave remains the same, and yet makes a break with the previous one. A continuous, cyclic, unalterable breath whose surge on the shore is its singular expression, telling a whole word and each time different.
If there is a break, what is it? A new aesthetic? A manifesto? The manifest belongs to nature, and the aesthetic is deconstructed.
What the New Wave borrows from the eponymous film movement of the last century is not the intellectual or technical heritage of these authors and actors, but the profound rupture it evokes. It is not the rupture of one generation asserting itself against another, of artists and authors against others. On the contrary, it is a gesture of withdrawal. A break with individualism and its egotic production, a break with the cultural extraction of man from nature, a break perhaps even with man himself.
The New Wave is like an attempt to withdraw from the omnipresent anthropocene ego, where the artist becomes an assistant, a sherpa, a supporter of the surrounding natural forces.
By orienting the references of culture towards those of nature, we look at New Wave not as the cultural expression of a set of individuals, methods and techniques but literally as the expression of its own word: the wave itself.
It is therefore not so much the question of the artist, that of the “I”, but rather the question of the “we”.
On the same level as the anthropocene and the collapse on the horizon, artists have found themselves, following modernity, to be the cornerstone of the norms that have built the individual. A movement of withdrawal, a slowing down becomes an act of resistance and construction. And this, by putting the primacy to question again, at the same time, its relationship to the environment and its relationship to the collective. Without the collective, ecology stumbles and more broadly all struggles.
We do not defend nature, we are nature defending itself.
The Nouvelle Vague exhibition is an immersion in this sometimes mountainous, sometimes maritime nature. The ink produced by the burnt wood collected on the edge of the forests and on the shores will be deposited on the linen canvases following the design of the mountainous reliefs, and the vitality of the incessant waves.
New Wave is also the photographic capture through instructions or simple gestures, of the attempt to bring out joy, peace and life. Sometimes a full immersion under water as in the series We tried to fall asleep under water, sometimes a gesture of love towards nature with Tentative amoureuse, or giving it a voice with Révolution naturelle.
Nouvelle vague is finally Chrysalithe sculptures, in collaboration with the artist Aimée Fleury, thought as an altar of protection to this fragile nature that humanity mistreats.
In this exhibition at the Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana in Turin, Nouvelle Vague inaugurates on April 7, 2022, a word as close as possible to a natural expression, an attempt to put the sea and the mountains at work, and a desire to rethink the collective in an intimate, ritualized relationship with nature.
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Exhibition view Room 1 – Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana
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The Cultural Association BArock is pleased to present the new solo exhibition by the French artist BENOÎT BARBAGLIinstalled in the Appartamento Padronale of the Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana (entrance Via della Consolata 1bis – Turin) from Thursday April 7th to Saturday May 21st 2022 (open to the public Wednesday to Saturday from 4pm to 7pm, or by appointment) with an invitation-only preview on Thursday April 7th from 6pm to 9pm. With this great exhibition entitled NEW WAVEThe historic rooms inhabited by the Marquises of Saluzzo symbolically reopen their doors to the city of Turin after an interruption of more than two years, inaugurating the cultural program dedicated to the celebrations of the tercentenary of the Palace, conceived in 1715 and inaugurated in 1722 by order of Count Baldassarre Saluzzo di Paesana. Artist Benoît Barbagli, born in 1988 in Nice and a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de la Villa Arson, grew up in a family that has always been active in the art world, which has stimulated and supported his expressive training since his debut in 2011, the year of his first performance – FLUXUS Concert at MoMA in New York – with his grandfather Ben Vautier. This is the artist’s tenth solo exhibition and a comprehensive survey of most of the themes he has addressed over the past eight years. The exhibition describes a hymn to life and love through the magical language of the elements of nature, while being a personal manifesto of the expressive freedom of art. The exhibition includes 30 works and is divided into two main sections, in perfect symbiosis with each other. The first section brings together a series of paintings, mostly large format, including four triptychs and a polyptych, painted in charcoal using a technique that mixes Dripping, Action Painting and Land Art, using different natural and wild scenarios as “workshops” and making the elements of nature work together. The second section presents a gallery of photographic works testifying to as many performances, which tell different experiences, but always in constant balance between Love and Nature. The large reception rooms of the Appartamento dei Marchesi di Saluzzo host on their large walls the “Ecotopìa” cycle, large white canvases painted with black charcoal using a special technique capable of encapsulating the four main elements of nature: earth, fire, water and air. The works draw their origin and inspiration from the choice of the place where they are created, which manifests itself in the form of the Genius Loci and is present in a different way in each work: from the forest of Fontainebleau near Paris, already the scene of the first experiences of the impressionists in the open air, to the rocks of Cap Ferrat, to the summit of Notre Dame d’Amirat and the sacred mountains of Anapurna in Nepal. The chosen places host the different phases of the realization of these works, starting with the creation of the pigment used, obtained by pulverizing the charcoal resulting from the combustion of wood collected in these same places, as if to evoke ancient pagan rituals. The pigment mixed with a vegetal fixative is thrown on the canvas and then “painted” thanks to the intervention of atmospheric agents, such as the waves of the sea and the wind, which spread and diffuse it, creating fascinating abstract patterns by their singularity. The boudoir and the salons of the Appartamento Padronale are occupied by the photographic part of the exhibition. The 15 selected images are part of a much larger body of work in progress, evocatively titled “10 Years of Love,” which documents the profoundly “romantic” aspect of the artist, as 18th century poets might have understood it, that is, the way in which Benedict constantly evokes the power of the natural world, celebrating its fragile beauty. Among the various rooms, the “wunderkammer” of the palace, which once housed the collections of exotic and curious objects of the Marquis of Saluzzo, stands out. This series of photographic shots made since 2014 documenting as many “jumps into the void”, evocative of Yves Klein’s most famous “Saut dans le Vide” of 1960, ideally inscribes Benoît’s work in the New Realism current. In the enchanting setting of the Rade de Beaulieu, on the French Riviera, the artist leaps into the unknown, each time reaching for the sky for a moment with a different object: a bouquet of flowers, a musical instrument, a torch to light the darkness of knowledge, the iconic fruit of art from Andy Warhol to Cattelan. Scattered throughout the different rooms of the exhibition, like a hyphen, are resin sculptures such as “Geste d’amour”, which reproduces the symbolic gesture of the artist to “offer” a bouquet of flowers, as if to welcome visitors at the entrance of the exhibition, and the two “Chrysalithe” created in collaboration with the Parisian artist Aimée Fleury, forms of organic sensuality that refer to an imaginary universe soft with richness and sensitivity.
Enrico Debandi
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Exhibition view – Natural Revolution 1 & 2 Salotto Giallo
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When looking at Benoît Barbagli’s paintings, the first thing that comes to mind is American action painting: that of Pollock, De Kooning and Kline, but also the Venetian Emilio Vedova. The American action painting, where the physical act becomes important and where the painting is the manifestation, but for Barbagli, the action, the material and the sign have a different meaning. All of Benoît’s work is based on nature and its elements, which become both action and matter. Through fire, the earth with its trees and debris, mixed with water from the seas and mountains, the artist creates the ink that is deposited on each canvas. Fire, which has always been a symbol of regeneration and progress for the artist and his friends who often accompany him, becomes a place for the creation of rituals, dances and performances. The paintings are done entirely in the natural environment, which becomes a spiritual and religious place. It is not by chance that many of his paintings are triptychs, such as “The Rite of Spring” or “The Cliffs of Gars”. This type of work, which has always been linked to the religious world, was normally an altar decoration with side panels that could be closed on the central part, visible only on special liturgical occasions: Benedict’s triptychs no longer sacralize any Christian religious authority, they are open, not closable, ready to show the “natural” divinity. Nature is also Benoît’s workshop: mountains, rivers, the ocean become his working space, the performance is often marked by the nudity of the artist and sometimes also of his friends and colleagues who accompany him in his artistic expeditions. The sea, the mountains and the manifestations of the natural environment create the work and the canvas captures these moments. The four elements (fire, air, earth, water) are recurrent, animating Benoît’s universe which diverts cultural references and sends them back to nature. To do this, the artist disappears, the art emerges but without the action of the artist, his paternity is questioned because he prepares the scene but the gesture is made by nature. Benoît Barbagli transports his paintings to the mountains, from the Annapurna massif or the Alpes de Haute Provence, or to the shores of the Mediterranean, so that they can create, the mountains and the sea. One could compare him to Land Art artists but, unlike them, he does not modify the landscape, it is nature that has an artistic action on his works. The artist throws natural ink made on site into the landscape, so that it stains a canvas placed either on a cliff or on a rock, the ink drips from the rocks onto the canvas below. The fall of the latter and the aspect of the ground constitute the imprint of the work. The creation of the work is as fast as the fall of its ink from a height of ten meters, made with charcoal and water, but here it also mixes with various rock debris. It is the same with the sea, the canvas placed on the cliff receives the rhythm of the waves and these, with the shore, cover it by diluting its color; the canvas becomes the fruit of the collaboration between the earth and the sea, and Benoît is the spectator. He climbs, swims, walks, freedives and throws himself into the void as in his Tentative Amore and Salti d’Amore. The four natural elements and what follows from them in the environment, such as heat and cold, are shown in night and day landscapes, the sea and the mountains, all reinforced by the nudity of the body that inhabits and becomes an integral part of these places: man is no longer facing nature but is part of it. If the artist is the spectator of the “natural” creative act, we become observers of the relationship and communication between the artist and nature, thanks to the photographs and videos that bear witness to natural performances. The camera is perhaps the only element where Benoît imposes the creative act itself, by which he manages to take the soul out of nature and its elements and bring it back to us. From his shots in works such as Coat of light, or Cross, or Underwater Ritual, but also in Natural Revolution, the concreteness of nature shines through and the camera lens becomes an extension of life.
Luigi Crea
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