Young Italian Artist Antonio Della Guardia develops an investigation into the impact of contemporary forms of work on the body, on cognitive processes and on the most intimate spheres of our private life, identifying their signs and, at the same time, imagining poetic forms and strategies of shared emancipation.
Per un Prossimo Reale originates from the encounter with the studies of William Horatio Bates (1860-1931), a North American physician known for the development of a method to retrain eyesight without the use of glasses. If the Bates method has been subjected to fierce criticism by the scientific community, which has refuted its effective therapeutic validity, its strong imaginative charge has turned it into an object of worship for unorthodox scholars of perception.
Almost a remnant of twentieth-century scientific research, the Bates method represents for the artist a repertoire of possible performative practices, which he freely picks out and transfigures, crystallizing them within sculptural and installation devices that he then meticulously arranges in the exhibition space. In their encounter with the visitor, each of these devices is transformed into a tool designed to stimulate dormant processes, both of the gaze and of the imagination. The result is an environment, an open training ground for the imagination, that visitors are invited to experience slowly and in solitude.
Through this place of paradoxical functionality, Antonio Della Guardia attempts for a moment to divert our cognitive energies, pointing to interruption and flight as cultural techniques of survival. Per un Prossimo Reale celebrates the poetry of deceleration, of minimal forms and gestures, offering a space to experience the potential, regenerative qualities of the simplest processes of the human imagination.
(from the press release)
Antonio della Guardia, Per un Prossimo Reale, curated by Vasco Forconi, Pastificio Cerere, Roma, 23.09 – 27.11.2021
Admission by appointment only at: www.pastificiocerere.it
