Sell Naples and Die at Galleria Fonti / Napoli

Vendi Napoli e poi Muori – Sell Naples and Die

inspired by Gennaro Ascione’s novel

Curated by Lorenzo Xiques

Maurizio Esposito – Gianluca Panareo – SAGG NAPOLI – Sven Sachsalber – Constantin Thun

Galleria Fonti, via Chiaia 229, Napoli 

September 20 – November 29


 Sell Napoli and Die – Exhibition view.

 Sell Napoli and Die – Exhibition view.

  Sell Napoli and Die – Exhibition view.

 Sell Napoli and Die – Exhibition view.

 Sell Napoli and Die – Exhibition view.

  Sell Napoli and Die – Exhibition view.

 Sell Napoli and Die – Exhibition view.

 Sell Napoli and Die – Exhibition view.

 Sell Napoli and Die – Exhibition view.

  Sell Napoli and Die – Exhibition view.

 Maurizio Esposito, Vesuvio, 11 Luglio 2017, 2019 –  Giclée print, Lucia EC pigment inks,Hahnemulhe
Photo Paper rag 308GSM, 107 x 150

 Constantin Thun,
Untitled (ampoule of San Gennaro’s blood) – Paper, 15 x 10,5 cm.

 Maurizio Esposito,
Ghost Trees, 2019 – Giclée print, Lucia EC pigment inks, Hahnemuhle  Photo, Paper
rag 308GSM, 21 x 15 each.

  Sven Sachsalber,
Giallo Napoli, 2019 – Oil on graphite on canvas, 158 x 110 cm.

 Sven
Sachsalber, Giallo Napoli, 2019 – Oil on graphite on canvas, 158 x 110 cm.
(detail)

 SAGG NAPOLI, YOU ARE
CANCELLED, 2019 – Spray paint, variable dimensions.

 SAGG
NAPOLI, Shout out to nonna who loves me for who I am, 2019 – video, 1’16’’

 Gianluca
Panareo, The Doors of the Mountains King’s Hall, 2017 – Galvanized steel, 200 x
300 cm.

  Gianluca
Panareo, The Doors of the Mountains King’s Hall, 2017 – Galvanized steel, 200 x
300 cm.

—————————————————


Galleria Fonti is
pleased to announce the group exhibition Vendi Napoli e poi muori – Sell Naples
and 
Die, with artists
Maurizio Esposito, Gianluca Panareo, SAGG NAPOLI, Sven Sachsalber and Constantin
Thun, inspired by Gennaro Ascione’s novel and curated by Lorenzo Xiques.
The exhibition will
be the fourth of a series of group shows in which guest artists and artists of
the gallery program will deal with a specific topic showing both existing works
or commissioned for the event.
The five artists
involved will collaborate and explore the concept of “napoletanità” –
a word used to express the Neapolitan spirit – in the current globalisation
era, main theme of the novel used as a pretext to develop anthropological or
psychological analysis on the territory in a critical and expositive ideal
dialogue.
Vesuvio, 11 luglio
2017 and Ghost Trees are the titles of the photographs by Maurizio Esposito,
which have been selected from an ongoing project started two years ago.
“I lived on the
slopes of Vesuvius with my family, sharing presence and belonging to the place.
This strong,
unconscious feeling,
slowly got diluted by the distance, looking at everything from afar, turning
Vesuvius into a landscape. In July 2017, 2.700 hectares of pine forests were
burned and 50 million bees died. I felt a sense of danger and protection. I
helped the fire brigade after a tormented night of anguish. Vesuvius was
awakening as an inner presence. When everything extinguished, I felt the need
to return and take pictures, dedicating to “him” a real assignment
that continues today. “
The Doors of the
Mountain King’s Hall by Gianluca Panareo.
“On the first night I
arrived in Naples, while I was sitting on the steps of a church with friends, I
was attacked by the balls thrown by some street kids, a clear invitation to
free what was their usual playground. I invited them to express their energy by
throwing balls in the spaces of the abandoned Arti Grafiche Napoletane
typography, where I was doing my site-specific intervention. On the walls I
hung dozens of metal printing plates lying abandoned on the floor, connected to
sensors and then synthesizing the noise produced, in order to create an
“orchestra” of noise music … That noise, that energy imprinted,
from anger it would become a reason for joy and fun, the driving force behind
my installation. “
The graffiti You are
cancelled and the video-installation in dialogue with the “open” balconies
of the gallery are the two site-specific interventions that SAGG NAPOLI
imagined for the spaces of the Galleria Fonti.
“SAGG Napoli’s
artistic practice uses narration as a tool to examine the complex socio-political
knot of the South of Europe: its historical traces and geo-political
entanglements. Placing the body within a specific time and context, the artist
reflects on the notions of productivity, self-control, and achievement. The
period is the current divisions between peoples and countries, amid increasing
territorial acts and cultural biases; the context is Naples, the city of her
birth.”
Untitled (ampoule of
San Gennaro’s blood) by Constantin Thun is the title of one of the dozens of
postcards that the artist sent to friends in Europe during his stay in Naples
in 2015. “NUMI” is one of the words chosen and engraved on the
postcard, used in speech therapy for the functional re-education of the
communicative and cognitive disabilities of written and oral language, one of
the problems of communication in today’s digital age, and the central theme of
the ongoing project.
Giallo Napoli is the
title of the site-specific work created by Sven Sachsalber, a monochrome of the
size of 150 x 100 cm built on a grid of thousands of boxes that the artist has
filled day by day with a similar oil color for tonality and toxic component to
the color giallo Napoli, exhausting research of the shine that characterizes
the original one. The famous color of ancient origins, used in painting and
emblematic of the city of Naples, according to the artist’s research has never
been registered and patented, yet it is present in commerce.
“It does not yet
belong to anyone, except to its own city”.
——
Sell Naples and Die
Narration and its
optical languages are no more than a pretext to strip off vital fluids off the
rotting carcass of novel as a form: the non-sensical falsification of an
intuition that departs from the title and rushes to return to the title itself
as soon as possible, by never turning back: Sell Naples and Die. Intuition, as
such, has little to do with the so-called author, who committed suicide long
time ago now. The author passed away immediately after he had doomed his own characters
and the snotty history of their psychic evolution to death, in order to
sacrifice their bodies and their personal vicissitudes on the altar of a city
that a city is no more. Naples is not a stratified urban space anymore rather
it is a coherent system of signs immediately recognizable by a generalist
public of consumers therefore easily saleable within the global market of mass
cultural products. Who is genuinely interested in Naples? Surely not who
demands to the really-existing-city nothing but the sparkle of cold light that
the entertainment industry scientifically produces by inducing rhythmical
mechanical frictions between stereotypes and archetypes. Both are in fact «types»
even though the latter are encrusted forms of the former, which produce the
illusion of being perennial while they draw legitimacy simply from the
a-temporalized and de-spatialized sinking of the hierarchies of power that
establishes what is to be considered eternally human and what eternally
monstrous. Nevertheless, it is precisely upon the fault-line of such an
enduring anthropological monstrosity that Naples unleashes its semantic substance
that is pneumatic in nature; one that is able to inform, deform and transform
unspoken words, hidden images, and unlived experiences, into Otherness:
inspiration into conspiracy; literally, «breathing in» into «breathing with».
Naples, thereby, becomes a necessity. The necessity to breathe collectively
from a single imagery. Such an imagery materializes through the panoply of
digital tools and telematics of XXI century, but it becomes visible for what it
actually is: a telepathic matrix wherein the relationship between alternative
and mutable configurations of the spacetime does not allow one single
chronology of pasts, presents, and futures, rigidly defined once and for all.
For this reason, the collective artistic intervention into this imagery that
Sell Naples and Die re-activates, thus celebrates, gives life to six creative
acts, six distinctive morphogenesis, whose presence, nonetheless, marks a
co-presence within a single morphodynamics ruled by occult internal ratios
through six hermeneutical figures: memory, erasure, paroxysm, anachronism, commodification,
heresy. The project Sell Naples and Die lives with the secret and seducing
voluptuousness that drift could become a shipwreck among the waves of
degeneration rather than comfortable stagnation into the mirror swamp of what
has been already said or already done.
Gennaro Ascione