Satellite, Florence
18.09.2020 – 18.12.2020
text: Federica Fiumelli
Exhibiting Artists: Jake Aikman · Michelangelo Consani · Bonolo Kavula · Sepideh Mehraban · Mabel Palacín · Laura Paoletti · Robert Pettena · Jaime Poblete · Jacob Van Schalkwyk · Shakil Solanki
Suburbia, Satellite and on this occasion “Surroundings” – find in their first letter “S” a serpentine, non-linear, sinuous, telluric movement, oriented towards the experimentation of the unexpected, unscheduled, original, multiple and sensitive form.
“Can you hear me Major Tom? “
“There is an Outside that propagates outside & an Outside that propagates Inside / Beyond the Contours of both Identities, which meet in One …” [William Blake, Jerusalem]
Like the vaunted Major Tom, we are all witnesses of something great, of something in constant transformation, of something in constant connection – between us and the world, us and the cosmos, between reality and imaginative power. It is therefore necessary that each of us becomes a mobile and sensitive Satellite, a constant receiver in perpetual movement that oscillates restlessly searching for a shared value. The Satellite gravitates, never intransitive, pulses energetically only if connected to other forms of creation. The Satellite is not only nomadic in its mobility, but while stopping it manages to unhinge codes and rules by making difference and diversity a precious prism from where observe the sounded, refracted, multiple and divisible light in countless hypotheses.
“We do not arrange things in an order (this is the function of use): we simply facilitate the processes so that whatever can show itself.” [John Cage, For the birds. Conversations with Daniel Charles]
The Satellite deals with trials and as Lou Reed already told in the Seventies with “Satellite of Love” – we observe its launch and reflect.
The Satellite from space becomes space itself. In a Kafkaesque mutation it continues, as the flow of water, almost like a sacral rite.
Satellite comes to life by landing in Florence, birthplace of painting space and perspective, after a period of activity in Cape Town – to leave one day for who knows where again.
Satellite is confirmed as an itinerant space parallel to its so-called biological mother, Suburbia, Art Gallery now in Granada – root that contains in its name the idea of zone, space, peripheral environment – an autonomous nucleus that wants to evolve and become independent. As a matter of fact, Satellite cities take their name by smaller residential centers where the suburbs had their primitive function. As contemporaries Adam and Eve, one is born from the other, in a constant and compelling relationship.
How can Satellite not accept “Surroundings”? An exhibition which, only with presenting itself, declares its status to “surround”, to be “around”, “next to”, “close to”.
The three “S” – “Suburbia” – “Satellite” – “Surroundings” / art gallery, temporary space and exhibition project are sinuously aligned on this occasion, in an ancestral and masterful way, like three protagonists of a cosmogony free from labels or fixed abodes.
In its prism “Surroundings” welcomes and presents ten artists that Suburbia has been following for some time through an articulated production of projects and exhibitions: Jake Aikman, Michelangelo Consani, Bonolo Kavula, Sepideh Mehraban, Mabel Palacín, Laura Paoletti, Robert Pettena, Jaime Poblete , Jacob Van Schalkwyk, Shakil Solanki.
If the current capitalist system cancels the differences, it is right to give space to language diversity thus each time we can have a different vision of life, as also Maestro Federico Fellini claimed. In this way it’s fair for painting to encounter gestures, abstraction, iconicity, but also drawing, photography, installation, matter.
Through the prism proposed by Satellite we can sight plural art in the horizons where we can get lost of Jake Aikman, in the multiple references of Michelangelo Consani, in the technical surfaces of Bonolo Kavula, in the Eastern fragments between tradition and future of Sepideh Mehraban, in the photographic language – among reality and cinematography of Mabel Palacín, in the intimacy of the sign proposed by Laura Poletti, in the versatility through surreality and concreteness of Robert Pettena, in the material and englobing physicality of Jaime Poblete, in the rebellious and colorful gestures of Jacob Van Schalkwyk, in the melancholic, nostalgic and delicately blue eroticism of Shakil Solanki.
Suburbia, Satellite and on this occasion “Surroundings” – find in their first letter “S” a serpentine, non-linear, sinuous, telluric movement, oriented towards the experimentation of the unexpected, unscheduled, original, multiple and sensitive form.
“Things must change
We must re-arrange them
Or we’ll have to estrange them.
All that I’m saying,
A game’s not worth playing
Over and over again”
[Depeche Mode, The Sun & The Rainfall]
