Diego Bianchi
Argentine, b. 1969
During the last decade, the work of Diego Bianchi emerged as a magnifying and distorting lens of urban life that focused on the formal and mostly chaotic traces of consumerism, specifically the remnants of the neoliberal economic damage of the last postcrisis period (after 2001) in Argentina.
Bianchi’s practice proposes an apotheosis of everyday situations, such as the derailment of human excess and the anarchic order that follows; the destructive force of nature and time; and the assortment of colours, textures, and volumes of commodities. His works vary from small interventions and documentation of a city’s constellations of everyday leftovers to autonomous sculptures or human-scale monuments of decay turning into expanded physical and mental landscapes, with both natural and human-made references: hurricane, swamp, personal Wikipedia, school, market area, among others. In these landscapes Bianchi’s practice arises as ‘an impulse that destroys any serenity, any asepsis, any perceptive complacency.
Like a collision, his works confront us with what Maurice Blanchot would call “the sovereignty of the accidental”, in all its fury and madness’. The body, which has always been part of Bianchi’s installations, became a more concrete presence recently, first as limbs that animate and complement the objects and afterwards as complete fictional or nonfiction scenes inside a corrosive and volcanic interpretation of reality.
Text: Javier Villa in Guide__13 Istanbul Biennial
Submitted by Galerie Jocelyn Wolff


