Art Consulting. New York. A collector, a book and a performance by Andrea Bianconi

In March 2013, at a conference dedicated to the presentation of our book on art collecting held at the Italian Institute of Culture in New York, the Italian artist Andrea Bianconi gave a performance commissioned by us. Romance is a video performance that illustrates extracts of his stream of consciousness. The video contains a very fast sequence of images that reveal his thoughts as they appear in his mind. Words and images follow in rapid succession. There is a continuous relationship between every word, just as each image is connected to the next. Yet the meaning is mysterious, incomprehensible. His work has neither beginning nor end, but rather is a circular narration that indicates a discourse-course traversed by an endless chain of association, void, surplus, lapsus. Romance is a mixture of construction and deconstruction, of opening and closing, of intimacy and of extroversion. An endless chain of associations. Romance is a performance and an animation film alluding to the “mental cinema” of Italo Calvino. It is a search for the “traces of something that may not ever exist”. The artist is immobile in his performances. The video is projected onto his face. “Mental cinema”, Calvino writes in American Lectures, “is always at work in each one of us, and it always has been, even before the invention of the cinema. It never stops projecting images before our mind’s eye”. A flow of images, on the other hand, that well represents the journey of every collector, who needs to be able to extract from the sea of contemporary art the images that will tell his own story.