Diego Bianchi. The Charming Present

Diego Bianchi. The Charming Present
April 22–August 6, 2017

The Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires is pleased to announce Diego Bianchi’s exhibition: The Charming Present, curated by Javier Villa.

For this exhibition, Diego Bianchi (Buenos Aires, 1969) staged a dialogue between his work and the Museum’s collection, and incorporated works by Tomás Abal, Roberto Aizenberg, Antonio Amendola de Tebaldi, Ary Brizzy, Mildred Burton, Zulema Ciorda, Enio Iommi, Jorge Gamarra, Olga Gerding, Edgardo Giménez, Norberto Gómez, Alberto Heredia, Gyula Kosice, Eduardo Mac Entyre, Margarita Paksa, Aldo Paparella, Rogelio Polesello, Emilio Renart, Rubén Santantonín and Miguel Ángel Vidal, among others.

Bianchi´s works frequently dive into a scene of excess, erosion, chaos, and imbalance, as possible states of matter. His entropic landscapes are a kind of Big Crunch, which brings a strange feeling of harmony to the leftovers of a consumer society.

The Charming Present includes new works taking the form of devices, situations, and frameworks for the circulation, exhibition, and perception of other artworks, whether they are historical pieces belonging to the Museum or pieces taken from the artist’s own past. He forces the audience into a particular experience with the collection: erasing the pieces’ history and theoretical framework in order to unleash a potential offered by a frantic now.

Regarding this exhibition, the artist says: “I’m not particularly interested in tradition or heritage, I think that, as concepts, they fossilize the circulation of ideas. I am interested, however, in setting up different periods so that they co-exist in the same time frame: breaking up time, turning it back on itself, flipping it upside down.”

Works by different artists from different periods, be they material monstrosities or precise geometric pieces, live together in a space that breathes fiction, where a pedestal becomes a speaker, the wall is a large optical package and the space set aside for paintings is a street window with railings. No doubt, some of the works have never felt more comfortable while others do not understand how they can have ended up there. During this mingling process, the present devours the past but the past lingers on in the present as a kind of karma. The new story being told is necessarily fluid, a constant flow where stagnation is impossible. Time is shattered. The sculpture does not know what time it is.

Javier Villa says that art should never be tamed, it must be activated and set in motion so as to infuse it with power: “A work of art stuck in limbo only preserves its material self; its power is lost. Neutral exhibition spaces and the typical efforts of institutions to freeze time threaten to domesticate the very aesthetic that ought to be driven wild by artists, curators and the public.”