Teoria Ingenua degli Insiemi

P420 inaugurates its new space in Bologna, Via Azzo Gardino 9 with two exhibitions curated by Cecilia Canziani and Davide Ferri.

The model of the set developed by the German mathematician Georg Cantor (1845 – 1918) at the end of the 19th century, which was fundamental for the growth of modern mathematics, is a theory based on the concept of belonging: a set, to all intents and purposes, is a collection of distinct objects, with the particular characteristic that the elements of the set can themselves be sets. It is a theory that cannot be traced back to definite concepts; it is intuitive, open to paradox and contradiction.

Naive Set Theory is a title for two exhibitions: a project by Paolo Icaro, whose works have been chosen to activate a dialogue with an exhibition that includes pieces by Bettina Buck, Marie Lund and David Schutter.

The two exhibitions share the same space, next to each other or literally one inside the other. They can establish a dialogue of contrasts or temporary assonance, bringing connections to light between the poetics of artists who belong to different geographies and backgrounds. Nearly imperceptible resemblances that indicate shared concerns conveyed in different forms.

Naive Set Theory is therefore on one hand, an investigation of the work of Paolo Icaro (Turin, 1936), conducted over a very long time span and organized around the work Cardo e decumano (2010) which ideally re-orients the exhibition space and subdivides its boundaries. Around this skeleton composed of two orthogonal dotted lines, formed by numerical variations of modular iron parts, a non-chronological progression of works is organized, with pieces belonging to different periods. The Lunatici (Lunatics, 1989) are a set of actions of the hand on a given portion of material; Lassù: per un blu K. (Up there: for a blue K., 1990) is a work in which the measure of doing extends to encounter infinity in a single point; Esplosa (Exploded, 1990) is a sculpture that designs the space, that “makes space” instead of occupying it; Numericals 1 - 10 (1978), in which a dancer freely interprets a numerical progression, is a performance in which the body becomes sculptural material.

Icaro’s works indicate a vocabulary – gravity, levity, reciprocity, excess, limit, gesture, temporary character, body, risk – around which another exhibition unfolds through links and recurrences, with works by Bettina Buck (Cologne, 1974), Marie Lund (Copenhagen, 1976) and David Schutter (Pennsylvania, 1974): a dialogue among works whose trajectories meet and form a constellation of ideas, connections, suggestions.

Thus in Naive Set Theory Bettina Buck explores sculpture as a state of momentaneous stasis between germination and collapse, as form that offers itself only temporarily, as time, process, withheld energy, where the body – in its presence or simply evoked – becomes the most precise metaphor, or again as appropriated space, as in the site-specific intervention in which a barely perceptible line inscribes the zone of passage between the two rooms of the gallery and suggests the reversibility of a space from architectural element to object, sculpture.

Marie Lund investigates the dialectic between full and empty that is a structural part of the language of sculpture. She evokes a volume and analyzes it in its translation in to a surface, in the series Stills: six panels composed of curtains faded by time, unstitched and stretched on frames; she portrays the body as a negative in Attitudes, and explores the borderline between erasure and rewriting, appropriation and authorship in The Very White Marbles.

David Schutter’s works are the result of a long visual engagement with paintings as a phenomenal source of perception. Engaging with pre-modern paintings as source material for his works, Schutter seeks the surface effects, brushstrokes, and light within frames of reference that are rendered into the present by his re-performance of the pictures. The gray of his oil paintings is only apparently monochromatic. It is the result of attentive applications of successive layers of color and brush technique of different depth and density, generating the abundant, rich surface of his canvases.

Naive Set Theory is therefore one and two (or more) exhibitions built around ideas and intuitions that reference each other, that return interpreted in different ways and forms; punctuations of the display space, paths that meet at multiple points, (narrative) lines that sustain each other: the sets to which the title refers.