MUCH MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS TROPES | NORMA MANGIONE GALLERY | 2015
‘Much more than the sum of its tropes’
‘So much more than the sum of its tropes’ is a beautiful sentence
by critic and writer, Jo Walton, referring to Theodore Sturgeon’s sci-fi masterpiece “The Dreaming Jewels”
published in the US in 1950 and then translated and reprinted
in many different countries and many editions.
A “trope” is the use of figurative language via a word,
phrase or even an image for artistic effect.
The book has inspired an experimental tentative of a “narrative exhibition”
with the ambition of being something
more than the sum of its parts – an idea, a desire to create a dialogue
between attitudes and different disciplines, a compelling story
and works directly tied to the plot;
in some cases created specifically, in other cases painstakingly
chosen as visual counterpoints to the mental imagery invoked by the story.
The narrative experience is composed of intuitions, visions and language but also,
and above all, the logic of the events, a legible connection of the characters in action,
the balance and necessity of the actions and the stories. Here the exhibition,
an attempt to follow and organize these principles in the space of a courageous private gallery,
took advantage of the participation of the varied artists and of the collective curatorial work
in which the initiator Gianluigi Ricuperati involved Norma Mangione
and her staff in an unlimited dialogue, and above all Elisa Troiano,
co-founder of Cripta747, and in addition the crucial contribution
of the artist and graphic designer Marco Cendron.
The exhibition in which the works served as “figurative places” of the scenes
from Sturgeon’s book, asked the spectator to move around inside the space in the way
in which you move in a narrative text, with the suspension of disbelief typical
of fiction and the analytic and personal participation that characterizes the fruition of art:
painting after painting, sculpture after sculpture, intervention after intervention.
All the way to the point of imitating the act of immersive reading
in the trans human movement inside the gallery.
Studio Nucleo took part with Extroflexed Crystal
Opening 25.09.2015
Curated by Gianluigi Ricuperati, with the collaboration of Elisa Troiano
Via Matteo Pescatore, Turin (TO), Italy
© 2015 Studio Nucleo