The gallery rosenfeld porcini present Beyond Sight, a first solo UK exhibition for the collaborative duo Spazio Visivo. Installations merging sound with sculpture will be presented across both floors of the gallery space. Spazio Visivo will also hold a conference and concert in the gallery during the final week of the exhibition in late September.
Spazio Visivo is an artistic collaboration, which combines the sound compositions of musician Stefano Trevisi within the framework of sculptor Paolo Cavinato’s installation-scapes. Lyrical yet disconcerting, their unique world is composed from photographs, mirrors, paint, faded wallpaper, wood and strange surrealistic visions of ominous corridors, reminiscent of Paolo Cavinato’s previous life as a stage designer; whether intentionally narrative or not, this visual complexity results in a deeply immersive experience with the sound composition often emanating from a variety of hidden sources. There is an innate mystery dominating the installations, which in turn is concerned with the idea of space –both real and imaginary, and time in order to achieve the duo’s ideal of an ‘absolute space’. The interplay between: Sound and vision; sound and silence; real space and imagined space is played out with great skill and intelligence.
The spectator can enter the physical environment of some installations, and in others observe the work from one point or various points of view. Trevisi, the composer, perfectly allies his own sonic concerns to that of the installations: Allowing the sound to interact in terms of source, content and volume. He also embraces a wide range of influences ranging from ancient music to contemporary sound making, using both conventional instruments and electronic manipulations. The space and sound therefore in all the works is seen in continual flux between the real and the imagined in a visual sense and the understood and mysterious in a sonic sense.
The exhibition represents both an end point and a starting point for the two artists: For their first solo show at rosenfeld porcini, they have elaborated a retrospective of their artistic journey together over the last few years; presenting 9 works spanning from 2008 to their latest creations made expressly for the exhibition, which have been partly inspired by Paolo Cavinato’s time spent in Shanghai at the prestigious Swatch artistic residency. Although there is a unity of concern in all the pieces, which is a result of their long collaboration, there has also been a noticeable development during recent times.
The piece Hands, a large 6 meter wall installation, is a further exploration of the Berlin based piece Icona (2010), a sound and visual installation, which featured in our Memory: Contemporary International Sculpture exhibition in 2011. To quote Paolo Cavinato’s own description, ‘The ‘universe’ I have created features many cells of varying sizes, boxes, architectural spaces and rooms, which recall both Medieval Art, Old Master Paintings (Giotto, Maso di Banco and Simone Martini), Italian Metaphysical Art, geometry, Platonic solids and Alchemy’. Memory and evocation are in a continual dialogue; each individual detail exists on its own terms but is also an integral part of the greater whole. Hands becomes a visual and sonic landscape. Everything has been assembled in a ‘pyramid’ like form where the summit is pointing downwards as if being collected into two open hands.
Lost, another work from this year, creates a wood labyrinth-like space where, from the outside, the spectator sees a myriad of possible corridors and thus loses any point of reference; the illusion is further exacerbated by lights, within the labyrinth, which illuminate some areas whilst others are plunged into darkness. The sound created by Trevisi will accompany the spectator both from within and outside the installation.
Beyond Sight unravels the incredibly fruitful and original collaboration between Paolo Cavinato and Stefano Trevisi, which is growing apace and, in reality, only just beginning its journey.
Spazio Visivo (Paolo Cavinato, Stefano Trevisi): Beyond Sight – rosenfeld porcini – until 26 september 2015