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Claudio Abate “Block Beuys”
Venue: Via della Mercede 12/a, 00187 Rome, entrance main stair, 3rd floor.
Duration: from May 4th 2006
Opening hours: by appointement.
Claudio Abate, one of the most important photographers sought-after by all the Italian and international artists, is now exhibiting, for the first time at the Galleria dell’Oca, a series of shots on the artworks by Joseph Beuys kept in the Darmstadt Museum.
This project, realized after Beuys’s death in 1986, was expressly wanted by Eva Beuys, the wife of the famous German artist. All these photographs came together only afterwards in an important volume, Joseph Beuys. Block Beuys, published by Schirmer & Mosel in 1990.
Eva Beuys, as Claudio Abate remembers, was struck by his work, which since the early Sixties had been witness to all the Artistic and Cultural Vanguards. She had probably been attracted by what we might call “warm fluid” which directly introduced the spectator into the heart of the artwork.
Abate has breathed Art since he was merely a child, since his father introduced him into cultural life at the end of the Fifties. His photographs are not simple shots but very long elaboration on Beuys and on the work itself. His eye doesn’t simply depict the object itself: he stands in front of it, and through a long process of working on the artistic subject, he starts a long series of relationships which investigate the outward reality focusing then on its essence.
Therefore the objects represented in the photograph lose their material connotation, and acquire all that the space and the history of that museum had transmitted to it. Between Abate and Beuys’ artworks there is a sort of osmosis which permits the reforming of the essence of it but also the soul of that place: the museum which contains all the objects, artworks and materials that the artists had accumulated in an anthropological attitude. For example, the famous chair with fat Stuhl mit Fett, 1963, 1986 -2006, is not a simple seat with material on it, but it is only the first sign that will induce someone to go into that place and feel the soul of the sciaman artist. Everything is the expression of a transformation of the permanent cycle of life.
This one interprets the signs of the fat dripping onto legs, but also the tin in the background and the two boxes, one yellow, the other black, placed symbolically close together. The shadows outline the almost sinuous shapes of the objects. It is a figurative dance of things that, frozen in time, come to life again under the photographer’s eye. These works thus control Claudio Abate’s Art achieved by its warmness through an almost antique “patina” which leads back to the “beuysian” concept of object as fount of warmth.
Benedetta Carpi De Resmini
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