Piacenza, Gianluigi Colin's monumental site-specific installation in the church of SantAgostino

A complex and monumental site-specific installation brings Gianluigi Colin ’s (Pordenone, 1956) exhibition at the Volumnia Gallery in Piacenza to life. For many years the artist has been working on the dialogue between images and words. The focus of his work is in particular the media system, the dimension of time and the value of Memory. Curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, the exhibition Quel che resta del presente, which can be visited from Sept. 23 to Nov. 19, 2022, represents a new and demanding challenge for Gianluigi Colin: the imposing space of the 16th-century Church of Sant’Agostino, courageously revived by Enrica De Micheli, has prompted Colin to confront the spaces. The exhibition was also made possible thanks to the coordination of Luigi De Ambrogi, installation design by Baldessari and Baldessari studio and a special lighting design by Davide Groppi. The exhibition is part of the program of XNL APERTO, a project dedicated to contemporary arts born from the synergy between public institutions and private entities in the Piacenza area.

Colin has created an exhibition designed specifically for the spaces of the church, in which he presents two new cycles of works very different in terms of representation, but united by the use of the same materials and the same language of abstraction. In total, it consists of sixty canvases, some even of large dimensions, as well as a monumental installation in the central nave of the church. On the one hand, Gianluigi Colin has decided to place his abstract works (which he has called Impronte, characterized by the fact that they are cleaning materials from newspaper or book printing presses) exactly where the sixteenth-century altarpieces used to be. It is the artist himself who emphasizes the nature of his artistic intervention: “In these object trouvés I found the symbolic removal of infinite stories, a metaphor for the forgetfulness that envelops our present. It is the trace of a dissolved time, evidence of many concealed existences. Canvases taken from the heart of the world of communication on which I intervened by assembling discontinuous fragments in an arbitrary reconstruction: Removed imprints of so many lives, dissolutions of infinite stories. From these considerations came the title of the exhibition: What remains of the present.” “I have always thought that in a place laden with memory such as the one hosting me,” he added, “an artist has above all a duty: to dialogue with pre-existing history, without necessarily annulling his own identity . For this reason I thought of a project, as respectful as possible, placing in the side aisles ten large works by inserting them exactly in the Baroque frames, exactly where the ancient altarpieces were placed before. In the side aisles I then placed another fifty works in the niches, while in the nave I created an installation in which large drapes descend from above and envelop the space as is traditionally done during special liturgical events. If museums represent the secular cathedrals of contemporaneity , here I wanted to evoke (and somehow celebrate) the also aesthetic dimension of the practice of worship, with its rites and ceremonies. And at the same time, as Hegel argued, to remember that the reading of the everyday remains ”the secular prayer of our time."

His work is meant to be a reflection on the tradition of the relationship between history, art and church. All the statues have been decapitated. The church, in fact, was the object of desecration by the Napoleonic army; Colin wanted to remember this historical event by reconstructing symbolic heads, but blindfolded, thus inviting reflection on iconoclastic culture and the practice of cancel culture.

The exhibition is realized with the support of Intesa Sanpaolo.

Hours: Tuesday through Saturday from 3 to 6 p.m. and by appointment.

For info: info@volumnia.space

Photo by Fausto Mazza

Piacenza, Gianluigi Colin's monumental site-specific installation in the church of SantAgostino

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