Design Art Week in Milan inaugurated a project and a still-active encounter between artist Tamara Repetto and the design signature Gaggenau sealed by the exhibition “Circuits of Sense.” Mediating this encounter was Cramum, a nonprofit project that has been supporting artistic excellence in Italy and the World since 2012, curated by the current Director Sabino Maria Frassà.
The title, ‘Circuits of Sense,’ well encapsulates and restores the sense of the works presented on this occasion, as well as that which runs throughout Tamara Repetto’s production and poetics, especially in its delineation and definition in the sensibility of the observer. This is how the artist expresses herself:
“We are nature and we find ourselves by reconnecting with it, that is, by abandoning the idea we have built for ourselves of being ‘alone’ and rediscovering interconnections with everything we define as ‘other.’ There is no such thing as I and others; we exist in the Whole we call Nature.”
If the exhibition makes the sense of smell the protagonist, what activates the works is the encounter between smell and matter, sight and memory. These are some of the ‘short circuits’ that the works offer on multiple levels of (perceptual) reading and that resonate in the visitor’s perceptual chords. Everything happens on a synaesthetic level, if we want to adopt this word out of its proper medical usage, yet effective to indicate a simultaneity of ‘perceptual reactions’.
Thus, Tamara Repetto ‘shapes’ sensory matter as the household appliance brand does with respect to its products that move between aesthetics and functionality. Works and design objects are perfectly integrated, as if they had always existed for each other. After an initial visual approach, the works-as the exhibition’s curator states in the accompanying critical text, ‘undermine the rational gnoseological approach’.” Indeed, the circuits of meaning result from the breaking of balances, first and foremost the certainty of having an objective view of the world and detached from perceptual experience.
When faced with the Tableaux Parfumés, surfaces of disposable hotel soapsuds supplemented by pine branches, roots and earth, and the three works in the Melancholia series, sections of earth contained within surfaces there aluminum and positioned vertically for impossible plowing, we instinctively look for the scent, expect it, maybe even are sure we have ‘tasted’ it. We are then proved wrong. We find ourselves, in fact, in the zone where anosmia reigns. The elements are deprived of any olfactory power; another short-circuit takes over, that between sight and experiential memory that associates the olfactory nature with that matter earth and soap – natural/artificial.
Fragrances return to presence released from pods stimulated by fans around the work Arboris, a nest-shaped structure that cradles and cares for a series of tree roots contained in glass ampoules. Their vital existence, visually enclosed by the ampoules, is reborn in the olfactory experience with scents of undergrowth, flowers and resins, in this case creations by Oikos Fragrances.
The sense of smell also returns in Meccano, the queen installation of this exhibition created as a site-specific. It is a series of three cubes made of Dekton, the same material used by Gaggenhau for the new Essential Induction cooktop model that makes the flame invisible. This time, a functional surface as aseptic to the eye as the cubes open to an olfactory treasure trove.
The cubes, “the realm of making, of building, of calculating, of measuring, the dimension of essentiality, of the invisible transcendent,” as the artist calls them, release through holes cut out on the very smooth surface, very particular smells. Indeed, green, floral, woody, earthy and humid notes follow from the cubes. They are the fruit of Caterina Roncati’s (Strega del Castello) experimental research. Mechano is the most active fruit of this encounter between art and design, but also of another ‘short circuit’, that between two different research experiences, equally creative, as that of Tamara Repetto and Caterina Roncati respectively, both projected into the experience of those who live them.
There is, then, a further device that complements the works on a different but complementary circuit of meaning. This is language, in this case that of titles. Tableaux Parfumés associated with soaps, Melancholia with the earth and its biodiversity, Mechano, complement, along with sight and smell, the image and form of the works. There ‘s no need to make the associations explicit. They will resonate in everyone’s experience. With almost absolute certainty we know that some references belong to the collective memory. Still, the needs to be experience in person and through all the senses.
Tamara Repetto. Circuiti di Senso/Circuits of Sense, curated by Sabino Maria Frassà, Gaggenau
Milan (the exhibition ca be visited by appointment), until 18.07.2024
images: (cover 1) Tamara Repetto (fragrances by Caterina Roncati), «Mechano», 2024 (2) Tamara Repetto, «Circuiti di Senso», installation view, Gaggenau (3)Tamara Repetto, «Melancholia n. 3», 2022, earth, roots, aluminum (4) Tamara Repetto, «Tableaux Parfumés», 2017-20 (5) Tamara Repetto, «Arboris», 2019, roots, glass, iron, plexiglass, arduino, olfactory capsules, fans, sensor of movement, cables (6) Tamara Repetto, «Circuiti di Senso», installation view, Gaggenau
