YOU AND MYSELF PERFORMANCES 2006-2016

May 21 -July 24 2016

Casa Testori, Novate Milanese, Milan, Italy

​Curated by Luigi Meneghelli

With “You and Myself”, Andrea Bianconi (Vicenza, 1974) returns to Casa Testori, filling most of the rooms with his repertoire of performances, built up over ten years, in which the artist uses the body as an expressive language and a symbolic matrix. A symbol that does not seek spectacular exhibition or provocative revelation. A symbol that acquires its own being (its own identity) by ceasing to stand as a symbol for something. It is as if it had nothing to say, as if it had only a series of events to suggest. Events left to the observer’s intuition. Bianconi’s performances also invite us to seek what is not there (which we do not see, which we do not feel). They invite our intuition to seek the possible alternative, the other side of the world. To bring into the open the entity hidden in the other (or elsewhere). The myself that con-fuses with the you. His poetic vision is one of movement and continual transition. The exhibition covers Bianconi’s entire itinerary of performances. Together with actions governed by playfulness (and surprise, or amazement), and minimal, restrained, incantatory actions, Bianconi develops other performances that imply genuine “collective performances”. The artist does not pose himself strict disciplinary limits, rules or hierarchies, if not those of opening himself towards others, towards the public, to arouse amazement, incredulity and interrogatives. Bianconi’s performances often approach a form of “artistic entertainment”. They may be gags, a series of apparently pointless gestures, of ridiculous playful acts. Like actors in silent films (or like children), he likes to hide himself and then burst suddenly on the scene. Masks often appear as instruments of defence, of flight, of falsity. In Trap for the Minds (2012), the artist obsessively dons and removes his mask, until we reach the final mask, which is none other than a reproduction of his own face. Numerous, too, are the images of the “traps” that Bianconi strews along the paths of his performances: boxes, mirrors, cages and masks that are often worn by his characters, without it ever becoming entirely clear whether they do this to hide themselves, isolate themselves, or to experience the dispersion, the broken boundaries of unforeseeable associations.

Catalogue: Silvana Editoriale, with essays by Luigi Meneghelli, Jean Paul Gavard Perret, Andrea Bianconi and an interview with Giuseppe Frangi

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