The NOw/here exhibition as narrated by Gian Maria Tosatti

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nowhere, gian maria tosatti, salone milano

Gian Maria Tosatti, “NOw/here”, exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio

In atypical retrospective NOw/here, the artist who represented Italy at the last Biennale offers a tour through new and reworked works of his spanning two decades of research

An exhibition by Italian Gian Maria Tosatti (Rome, 1980; lives and works in Naples) NOw/here opened on 23 February. As well as being an artist, Tosatti is a critic and curator (the concept for the upcoming Roman Quadriennale is his). He also had the honour of representing Italy at the last Venice Biennale in the pavilion curated by Eugenio Viola with a show called Storie della Notte e Destino delle Comete – much appreciated by visitors to the great international exhibition, even the most distracted.

During his impressive career, Gian Maria Tosatti has built up a very precise artistic lexicon in which the spaces his installations occupy are transformed by material elements, sometimes very simple, sometimes part of elaborate “scenographies” (as at Padiglione Italia) that effectively and with a certain lyricism project visitors into far-off historical and literary imaginaries.

gian maria tosatti, salone milano — Gian Maria Tosatti, photo Serge Domingie

Tosatti was invited by HangarBicocca’s Artistic Director Vicente Todolí to design a retrospective project for the Shed space, a sort of narthex in this great industrial Bicocca district “cathedral”. Using mnemonics and sensations to synthesize the themes that have characterized his pathway over the past two decades, the artist conceived new works that adopt a somewhat different approach to his historical-literary visitation of the Italian Pavilion.

The artist says: “It’s a different discourse at the Pirelli HangarBicocca. Because I was asked for a retrospective, I sought references not from outside but inside, from within my own history, the images and feelings that have driven my work over the years. The Hangar exhibition is more a confession than a tale.”

The body of works revolves around large-format elements in dialogue with the zeitgeist and the spirit of the artist’s generation. Tosatti conceived the works as open environments that engage and dialogue directly with the visitor. In his practice, installation spaces – including extremely complex ones – are not built to last; their presentation is closely bound up with the “life” and times of each exhibition. Even so, one never feels like being confronted with ephemeral spaces but, on the contrary, spaces built to live on, or that have already been there for a very long time.

The artist explains this is “because those places really have been there for a long time. We just don’t see them. The works are a form of training, to help see reality better. The installations I make are synthetic spaces in which elements of our everyday life, to which we are addicted and which, therefore, have become invisible to us, are put into the limelight. Rather than adding anything, the works show.”

gian maria tosatti, installation, salone milano — Gian Maria Tosatti, Terra dell’ultimo cielo, 2016. Environmental installation, site-specific in SS. Trinità delle Monache, Naples. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan and Naples

Depending on how it’s pronounced, the title of the exhibition, NOw/here, implies different interpretations strictly bound up with the dimensions of space and time. The terms may be considered singly, as “now” and “here”, or consequentially, as “nowhere”. Either way, the artist seems to suggest the relative and transitory nature of the experience these works and the environment they make up engender. Whereas in art and human experience we may in general detect a certain disinterest in the direct experience of reality and the progressive virtualization of spaces, Gian Maria Tosatti’s art seems to seek out a certain poetics of reality and matter.

However, as the artist himself points out, these two conditions are not antagonistic to one another: “I believe that physical and digital are not necessarily substitutions. Rather, I think both dimensions exist today, allowing people to be able to walk through both, to choose according to the circumstances. This leads to greater freedom. I therefore perceive not so much opposition as complementarity and enrichment. Painting will always be painting. A kiss will always be a kiss. But in the same way, to be something other than who you are in the physical world, building an avatar can generate sweeping emotions. Art is part of this. Neither better, nor inferior. One thing among many that are important and thrilling.”

The Hangar exhibition is completely continuous and coherent with the artist’s poetic journey, creating a mnemonic network or hypertext of ongoing references to his previous works, from Testamento – devozioni X (2011) to his more recent Episodio di Odessa (2020) and Storia della notte e destino delle comete (2022) mentioned above.

In NOw/here, Tosatti takes History as a material, moulding and interpreting it through personal and collective expertise, traversing history not just using historiographical tools but feelings evoked and reified in a given place. Space is always the trigger for his imaginaries: “My works are dialogues. The Genius Loci is a synthesis of identities that have inhabited a place. This is the entity I question in my works, making its role, I would say, decisive.”

Gian Maria Tosatti, NOw/here
23 February-30 July 2023
Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan