SCULPTURES WAKING UP, BODIES FALLING ASLEEP
What happens when you live so close to and with the depot of art history? When you have a look at a crucifix from the Giotto school while looking for fresh bread? When you sit in the garden and a stone poodle is looking over your shoulder? When the museum is your everyday and night environment? Some fall ill with the so-called Stendhal syndrome, not being able to keep a balance between finite subjectivity and the idea of an eternal beauty. Some write books like Joseph Brodsky about Venice discovering beauty as the only comfort against death. Alvaro Urbano made the sculptures walk and live bodies sleep as stones. When life-size sculptures are walking in front of your window, you are shocked for a moment or you feel like dreaming. When lying down on a white socle to sleep in company with many other fragments of stone bodies on the same socles, you may wonder what will happen during the night: stonification? Switch on the video over your head. It shows you what happens: it will be foggy, worms will be climbing out of earth, and the sculptures from last century are wakening up during a strange night under the full moon. What could a romantic trash movie tell us about how to move in space and time? How to confront fears? How to free imagination? How to experience flesh and blood and everything else we want to avoid? How to discover a simple reality much broader then daily duties? In 1953 Marcel Duchamp handed out glossy green candy papers at an opening in Paris, printed with the words: “A Guest + A Host = A Ghost” . He combined mathematical logics with semiotic analogy on the basis of an empty pleasure promise. In Alvaro Urbano’s Florentine works the grid of intellectual representation was opened. What came out was the physical invitation to share the state of a ghost while hosted as a guest.
Angelika Stepken
VR 14 This edition is the annual publication of the 2014 Villa Romana Fellows / Diese Edition ist die Jahrespublikation der Villa Romana-Preisträger 2014: Ei Arakawa, Sergei Tcherepnin, Natalie Czech, Loretta Fahrenholz, Petrit Halilaj und Alvaro Urbano.
Editor / Herausgeber: Villa Romana, Via Senese 68, 50124 Florenz / Firenze
Direction / Leitung: Angelika Stepken
Graphic Design / Gestaltung: Marco Ugolini
Print / Druck: Pöge Druck, Leipzig
© Villa Romana, Artists / Künstler
Published by / Erschienen bei: argobooks /
ISBN 978-3-942700-62-7
