NM Contemporary is pleased to present the group show "Le déjeuner sur l‘herbe" curated by Gaspare Luigi Marcone and installed in the garden of a private collector at Èze-Bord-de-Mer.

 

The exhibition, which evokes Édouard Manet’s famous masterpiece, features sculptures, installations, sound and verbo-visual works by Italian artists Nina Carini, Andrea Francolino, Goldschmied & Chiari, David Reimondo and Fabio Roncato.

The founding aspects of the exhibition are conviviality and debate, reflection on natural elements such as air, water, vegetation, earth.

An exhibition “en plein air”, in a garden overlooking the sea, auguring the return, after months of social isolation, of cultural activities and artistic exchange.

The exhibition “opens” with a sound installation by Nina Carina (1984) entitled Effatà (2017), which becomes the base, the track, the overture introducing the other works on show. This montage brings together Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and the sound of the sea in Sicily (the artist’s home region). Culture and nature are united around the word effatà (from ephphatha or “be opened” in Aramaic) with which Christ healed a deaf and dumb man (Mark, 7: 31-37).

Andrea Francolino (1979) analyses the fragility and precariousness of man and his works; the piece from the series A-Biotic(2016) is composed of a natural plant juxtaposed with an artificial composition in concrete and metal bars that imitates its forms. The vital freedom of nature is countered by the rigidity of building materials that are destined to decay despite their apparent solidity. Francolino’s ecological and anthropological research is also explicated in the work Humus 43.731553,  7.425526 (Principauté de Monaco); a flag made with a bamboo pole and a length of jute, eco-sustainable materials also used in certain agricultural practices, on which are marked in earth dust the GPS coordinates of the parliament of the Principality of Monaco (Conseil National de Monaco).  

 

 

The creation of these flags, which began with the exhibition Humus at the Museo Novecento in Florence (2020-2021), has a utopian message: bringing together all the nations of the Earth under flags similar in form and materials, differentiated only by the GPS coordinates of their parliament or political-institutional headquarters.

The verbo-visual installation by Goldschmied & Chiari (1975 / 1971), Motoperpetuo (2021), reproduces the letters of the title of the work in mirror-finish steel. There is a fusion with the surrounding nature, with the movement of the sea and the wind, with that perpetual motion of artistic research that must never (or should never) stop. A work that reflects and causes one to reflect.

Air and water, metaphorically and otherwise, are also the protagonists of the inflatable sculptures by David Reimondo (1973). In his macro-project entitled Etimografia (from 2010), the artist has coined hundreds of new graphemes and new phonemes to create a universal language. Universal in its basic ecumenical utopia and because it is adaptable and convertible to all forms or types of material, technique and research. Here, his symbols for “water” and “air” (elements that on a macroscopic level have no form of their own but take on the form of their containers) have been converted into inflatable sculptures, transparent and useable.

Motion, energy and the dynamics of water are also fundamental to the sculptures in the series Momentum (from 2018) by Fabio Roncato (1982). The artist immerses boiling melted wax into rivers where it cools and solidifies instantly, “tracing” the forms of the currents and the waters. Using the lost wax technique, these manufactures are then cast in aluminium, becoming true fragments of time, solid and metallic.

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