All images by Jeff McLane, courtesy of Depart Foundation, unless otherwise noted.
Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s recent solo exhibition 5122.65 Miles at Depart Foundation, curated by Luca Lo Pinto, was named for the distance between Venice, Italy and Venice, California. Calò’s work explores these two places, melding them until they start to feel as one. This body of work includes pinhole polaroid photographs that possess a washed-out quality, totemic sculptures arranged in the middle of the gallery, and a 13-minute video of various types of light exposure. There’s a dreamy quality here that makes the viewer feel as if they are gently journeying with the artist.
Installation view, Polaroid photographs by Giorgio Andreotta Calò for the exhibition “5122.65 Miles”.
Included in the exhibition was Calò’s video, “In Girum Imus Nocte” (2015). In it, bursting bulbs, jagged smoldering flames, headlights in the distance, exposed flashes, end-of-a-tunnel explosive lights, and others appeared on the screen. It’s curious to have begun the viewing experience here, following the light until one eventually arrived back at the gallery door where they entered. The series of Polaroids on the wall adjacent to the video offered still views of the video’s moving images.
On another wall further toward the front of the gallery, were the dreamy “car trunk photographs” series, all dated and titled “September 22, 2010” (2010). Calò actually captured these images of Los Angeles with a pinhole camera that he put in his car trunk. This sort of “chill vibe” also plays into the image of Venice, California, as a relaxed beach town where many artists used to live before it became a tourist-y destination spot. Calò plays more with the Polaroid as a form in his diptychs, all of which expose the underside of emulsion, making their patterns appear more like tiles on a wall. These visual tricks add a mysticism to the work.
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Alos included in the exhibition were raw bronze sculptures such as “DOGOD” (2015) and “Clessidra M” (2010), which were arranged around the middle of the gallery. Except, unlike the soothing qualities of the Polaroids, these bronze sculptures carry a sense of distress. This calls to mind Walter Benjamin’s famous essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which suggests that, because of the mechanical reproductive nature of each photograph, the object or place’s aura is lessened, becoming a part of an imaged culture. Could the sculptures be a purer manifestation of aura, or are they just remnants of the journey?
Giorgio Andreotta Calò, “Clessidra B”, 2011. Courtesy the artist.
This question applies to the photographs of cemeteries in Venice, Italy, where Calò captured Proust’s tomb, skulls, fireworks. If there is a shift or end to the visual reproductive qualities of all this, it’s signified by the shattered grass on the ground toward the entrance — as if all these visions were abruptly halted, stopped short. The curation of all the Polaroids gives viewers a sense of their similarly non-linear nature, allowing one to get even more lost in the images.
Installation view of 5122.65 Miles.
As an artist, Calò is known for his sculptures, specifically the ways that they “combine the symbolic forms of ancient cultures with the reductivism of modern and contemporary art,” according to an article on Artsy. Many of his sculptures seem like they were dug up out of the ground, attempting to find a new life in the world today. His photographs don’t capture that same quality, but that’s not the artist’s fault —it is the limiting medium, the fact that something has to exist in the world already in order to be photographed.
Installation view, Polaroid photographs by Giorgio Andreotta Calò for the exhibition “5122.65 Miles”.
Calò’s work challenges the dreadful trend toward the academicization of art; it seems like his work comes instead from a more spiritual place, or that it is art seeking a spiritual experience rather than an intellectual one. It’s refreshing to experience art that is enamored with its own visions, and the feeling one could get from it, rather than art that is lost in thought and references.
