Alberta Pane
Artissima 2016

Alberta Pane Gallery is pleased to present in the Main Section (Booth Orange 6) a trio-show by the Argentinian artist Luciana Lamothe, the Italian artist Romina de Novellis and the French artist Marie Denis.

The gallery presents a live performance ‘La Veglia’ during the OPENING (almost 8 hours of performance) by Romina de Novellis and also de Novellis’ photographs, a large sculpture / installation on the floor and some drawings by Luciana Lamothe and new works by Marie Denis.

Through new works combining concepts of strength and / or fragility, these three women artists explore the relation between the body and material, the body and the audience and also the interaction of works with the viewer.

For Romina de Novellis, her body is the center of her questioning, it is both the object of work, both the subject of research. She puts her body available to create living pictures to share with the audience. Her performances are very long and gesture is repetitive. The repetition that she uses serves as a magnifying glass on the details of our lives. Emphasis is not so much on repetition but on time. She wants to share time, a moment, with the audience.

For this next edition, she will present La Veglia, a LIVE performance where the body, naked, gets accustomed to the place and settles there for the entire day (almost 8 hours, during the Fair’s Opening) and in which a screen of red threads will be installed across a part of the booth. During this delimited period, she will create a sculpture of red knots: the thread knots has an allegory of prayer beads, the rosary for this long eve, or awaiting scene. The body will weave 2000 meters of red thread during the all day, unwinding progressively by hand the entire thread installation from top to bottom.”

Luciana Lamothe questions the relations between bodies, architectures and materials in urban, domestic and institutional spaces. She destroys social ceremonies, paying attention to the smallest of our self preservation instincts. Through subversive thoughts and illicit actions, furniture´s disassembly and sabotages filmed by a hand-held camera, her work - videos, sounds, installations, photographs and actions - put the public in the heart of her chaotic practice and her borderline position.

Luciana Lamothe will present a large sculpture and some drawings. The sculpture is functional that´s why it can be used by the audience. It is made of wood planks and metal pipes. She will force the metal pipes to reach its extreme fragility so as to cause the aggresivity of the sculptures. She uses the properties of the flexibility and weight of the materials to get a formal and useful advantages. Confort is not the goal here when you are seated, for example, but the direct relation of the body with the material. The aim is to show the aggresivity of the structures through the fragility of the material. Most of the materials she usually works with belong to the construction and architecture field. The approach of her work is to use the materials in such a way they will be at their limits of resistance but at the same time such fragility generate the mechanism of the work.

The work of Marie Denis centers first and foremost on an object and how it may potentially be reinvented. Marie Denis´s work also focuses on botanical principals. Her installations and sculptures are designed from raw materials and other objects diverted from their typical anchors in culture. She likes to circumvent the rules to realize her visions, and her work is a harmony between the universal and the everyday. For the artist, a piece of artwork always starts with a context and its interaction with the observer. What interests her most are the fleeting moments of meaning in a work – whether it be a tree, fruit, or architecture – and the observer’s interpretation of the proposal made to him. In this way there is a kind of constant re-invention of the work. Marie Denis hopes that the “proposals” broaden the observers’ perceptions.