Mario Cresci review – mind-bending tricks from an Italian iconoclast
Large Glass, London Whether photographing the cave-dwelling inhabitants of the south or a black square he’d painted on a wall, Cresci showed how the camera could manipulate our memoriesA few minutes into the mind-bending exhibition Mario Cresci: Geometries/Epiphanies, I find myself in a cerebral standoff with a grid of 16 black squares. This is the 83-year-old’s artist’s first exhibition outside his native Italy. Cresci belongs to a niche of Italian conceptual artists who took up cameras in the 1960s to reinvent cliches of the country’s famed identity. He studied industrial design in Venice and began working in photography after moving to Rome, where he was commissioned to photograph exhibitions of key arte povera creatives, stars of the city’s art scene in the 1960s, during the country’s period of post-fascist reckoning.Cresci was inspired by the movement’s anti-establishment approach and focus on the everyday, and it came to shape his own bold experiments, such as performances where he unfurled strips of blueprint paper printed with political imagery from the windows of buildings. Later, for a gallery show in Milan, he presented his version of Piero Manzoni’s 1961 work Artist’s Shit, but instead of tins of purported faeces, he covered the floor in 1,000 transparent plastic boxes, each containing a photograph of a consumer product. Continue reading...
Large Glass, London
Whether photographing the cave-dwelling inhabitants of the south or a black square he’d painted on a wall, Cresci showed how the camera could manipulate our memories
A few minutes into the mind-bending exhibition Mario Cresci: Geometries/Epiphanies, I find myself in a cerebral standoff with a grid of 16 black squares. This is the 83-year-old’s artist’s first exhibition outside his native Italy. Cresci belongs to a niche of Italian conceptual artists who took up cameras in the 1960s to reinvent cliches of the country’s famed identity. He studied industrial design in Venice and began working in photography after moving to Rome, where he was commissioned to photograph exhibitions of key arte povera creatives, stars of the city’s art scene in the 1960s, during the country’s period of post-fascist reckoning.
Cresci was inspired by the movement’s anti-establishment approach and focus on the everyday, and it came to shape his own bold experiments, such as performances where he unfurled strips of blueprint paper printed with political imagery from the windows of buildings. Later, for a gallery show in Milan, he presented his version of Piero Manzoni’s 1961 work Artist’s Shit, but instead of tins of purported faeces, he covered the floor in 1,000 transparent plastic boxes, each containing a photograph of a consumer product. Continue reading...
