Category: Exhibitions

The location, first and foremost: for this show, Essential-Confidential, Paola exhibition inside a historic hardware store nearby Piazza Carlina in Turin. A choice that is not only evocative but charged with meaning, since the hardware store is a workshop, a place of transformation, where ‘there are things to fix, to complement, to build’: a forge, real and metaphorical, where memories can be recovered, fixed and made manifest.

The title of the exhibition recalls the essential and the confidential as interwoven aspects in a single confession: it appears to suggest that the essential can only be found in the unveiling of an almost secret, private and remote dimension, which the artist lets us into through an exploration of his own memory and identity.

This exhibition is not just a collection of works, as Alessandro explains, but an unpacking, a staging of artistic and personal experiences: ‘I actually intended to process a whole series of minor fundamentals, even pop ones, linked in a double knot to my training, not simply artistic, but also sentimental’.

Of the five works in the exhibition, three are new productions. The first work is an unpublished photograph titled The First Time, apparently a strange portrait of Brian Molko (Placebo’s frontman), but in fact a reconstruction of a childhood memory by Alessandro, an important moment of fulfilment. ‘It was Christmas 1998, I see this video on MTV and I start to feel a sort of attraction towards the singer’, he recounts, ‘an attraction that was not sexual, but erotic in a ider sense: for the first time I considered my identity, and a desire based on an entity that I did not acknowledge in binary terms’. A memory to be reconstructed then: Brian Molko is played by Valentina, a friend of Alessandro’s, who through make-up and hairstyle work sets the artist, and us with him, in front of an image that is ambiguous by nature, falsified and implicitly monstrous as only memories can be.

Another largely autobiographical work is the Autoriquakkio (2024): an anthropomorphic swan that crashes, upside down, against a hemisphere of lithographic stone, on which Milan Cathedral is engraved. ‘It is a sculptural self-portrait,’ says Alessandro, ‘a model of beauty that fails’. There is therefore the theme of acceptance, one’s own and others’, but there is also the image of the fairy tale crashing into reality, one would think, yet the whole thing, while leaning on a hemisphere, is in perfect balance: as if the crash were part of the game. The failure of perfection is already implicit in its idea.

Music is another key theme in Alessandro’s biography, and one of the works on display is a musical score: a lithograph titled You Know You’re Right (Pain x 71). It is an arrangement of You Know You’re Right, the first song on Nirvana’s greatest hits album, released by DGC Records in October 2002 and the last song recorded by the band before Cobain’s suicide in April 1994, to which the title was given after his death. The concept of ‘posthumous’ appears to be particularly dear to Alessandro. But more importantly: ‘My big taboo in life has always been that I could not play music’, he says, ‘and this composition is an attempt to mend this void’. The notes become a bridge between past and present. As through Brian Molko’s photography, and in the swan, there is again an exploration of the poetic and sentimental grounds bubbling up in adolescence, or pre-adolescence, which Alessandro refers to as his ‘ghosts’: ‘the ghosts of my practice, elements that have always worked underneath. Here we go, it’s a good time for me to pull them out’.

In Essential-Confidential, the artist and the viewer share a moment of deep connection, an intimacy that runs between art and life. Each work invites the viewer to explore their own inner universe, turning the essential into a shared
experience.

When a vestige of someone else’s memory touches you, and for a moment it feels like your own, you know you’re right.

Fabio Cherstich

Case Chiuse by Paola Clerico presents Consolations, a solo exhibition by Sofia Silva (Padua, 1990), at Maradeiboschi: a multidisciplinary research project focusing on ice cream, coffee and chocolate.

The exhibition takes place in the Chocolate Laboratory and can only be visited during times when the maître chocolatier is not using the worktops, tempering machines or moulds.

Consolations presents new paintings conceived around the idea of solace in suffering and the delicate companionship that beauty may sometimes offer. In the classical era, the consolatio was a philosophical-literary composition written to soothe grief – a mission that Sofia Silva’s canvases also set out to achieve.

Silva’s painting has always shown imagery related to an ephemeral, emergent and doleful female world. Her specificity within the vast panorama of contemporary painting lies in the introduction of intimate and personal objects and subjects to the language of analytical painting. The analytical grammar – ab-soluta, non-referential and steeped in medium-specificity – in which Silva roots her research is in fact betrayed by a series of details drawing on biographical and generational chronicles.

Sofia Silva’s works are often abstract panoramas with a concise figurative apparatus. Painting alla prima and di tocco, Silva couples simple techniques with more precious ones to suit the needs of the single painting.

The artist believes in an anti-illusionistic kind of painting, linked to the material quality of the painting-object, humble. To emphasise these aspects, Silva often uses collage – a technique that breaks up the unity of the surface; the fragments inserted within the collage come from other canvases by the artist. Fragments painted in the present or in the past may coexist on the same canvas, thereby toying with the concept of time in relation to painting, and hinting both at the artist’s own life story and the development of her hand.

The canvases exhibited in Consolations feature overt lyricism, decorative and symbolic devices used in votive painting (the Marian rose and lily, the titles of the Virgin from the Lauretan litanies), classical references (the hippocampus, the shades inspired by Attic white-ground lekythoi), subjects taken from the world of toys (the rocking horse, dice, toy soldiers) or from the epics.

Devoid of negative connotations, sorrow in Silva’s work is accompanied by sweetness and grace, revealing itself in the ambivalence of the colour pink. Be it scarce, sumptuous, burnt, pearly, icy, childlike or sepulchral, each painting has its own pink, which by referencing different moments in the history of art, activates atmospheres that are from time to time welcoming or stern. Pink ultimately ripens in the hue of the mara dei boschi: the variety of strawberry that gives the place its name.

Sofia Silva (b. 1990, Padua) studied at IUAV University of Venice (2009-2012) and gained a Master Degree in History of Arts and Preservation of Artistic Heritage at Cà Foscari University of Venice (2013-2016). In October 2023, she participated in the group exhibition Italian Painting Today, Triennale (Milan). In parallel to her painting practice, she has been writing texts on art for ten years for magazines and catalogues of institutions including La Quadriennale di Roma, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles, KW Institute for Contemporary Art. She lives and works in Padua.

Founded in February 2014, Case Chiuse by Paola Clerico is a nomadic platform of research, production and consultancy in the field of contemporary arts. Over the years it has conceived and produced exhibitions occupying special places that would otherwise not be accessible, chosen together with the artists for their authenticity and relevance – be it functional, narrative or sentimental – to the project. The idea of a physical and mental wandering as a source of freedom also guided the work of Case Chiuse throughout the three years the platform was based in Via Rosolino Pilo 14 in Milan: a partially sedentary interlude that ended in September. With Case Chiuse #16 – Consolations, the platform once more becomes nomadic.

Maradeiboschiproduces artisan chocolate by researching and selecting raw materials of the highest quality. Maradeiboschi creates special editions by transferring concepts and forms developed in collaboration with artists, designers, writers, scientists, innovative companies and start-ups into the product. The passionate design and the careful handcrafting of each chocolate and box result in a unique product in both shape and taste.

We are happy to announce our collaboration with LIAF — Lofoten International Art Festival for the production of Something Out of It, a preview exhibition opening in conjunction with the 59th Venice Biennale. Curated by Italian duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Something Out of It has been conceived as a precursory exploration of the curatorial themes set for the 30th anniversary of LIAF, temporarily uprooted from Lofoten Islands in the Arctic circle to the Venetian lagoon. The project will take place in two venues: a private palazzo and the parlour of a functioning women’s prison.

TOMASO DE LUCA                                                 
Case Chiuse # 15 by Paola Clerico
Location: Casa Venezia
Calle Seconda dei Orbi, 5201 Castello, Venice, Italy.
Opening days: April 18–24, 2022, from 10am to 6pm

In the Castello district Something Out of It  breaks into a domestic environment. The courtyard of Casa Venezia, residence of the collectors Massimo Adario and Dimitri Borri, hosts a new exhibition by Tomaso De Luca (Verona, Italy, 1988), produced in partnership with Case Chiuse by Paola Clerico.
Winner of the 2021 MAXXI Bvlgari Prize, De Luca continues his investigation into the crisis of modernism – as the promise of a functional life for all – and processes of gentrification, linked to socio-natural phenomenons, such as the AIDS epidemic or the most recent climate change.
Consisting of sculptures, photography and a video, the installation debunks the myth of comfort, transforming the house into a treacherous place. Furniture and everyday items are transformed into potentially lethal traps — the activation of such traps being shown through a visual grammar that is both threatening and comical. 
De Luca’s project is inspired by a news story. In February 2019 in Philadelphia, a real estate developer escaped a guillotine device, hidden in one of his properties and designed to kill him.
The artist links this news event to the consequences of climatic gentrification that is sweeping the American city. The violent act is read as an extreme and desperate attempt to resist increasingly brutal economic dynamics.

Video Tomaso De Luca, Desperate Times, 2022
video color, sound, loop, 16’35”
Camera Luigi Ciccaglione, Primo De Santis
Editing Luigi Ciccaglione
Cinematography and Color Grading Primo De Santis
Music and Sound Naemi

PAULINE CURNIER JARDIN
Location: Casa di Reclusione Femminile (women’s prison) Giudecca, 712, 30133 Venice, Italy.
Opening: April 19, 2022, from 5 to 7:30pm. 
Mandatory registration: LIAF@margaretlondon.com 

Something Out of It unveils also a permanent communal installation by artist Pauline Curnier Jardin (Marseille, France 1980) in collaboration with the inmates of the Casa di Reclusione Femminile della Giudecca, an Italian women’s prison located in the former monastery of the Convertite where around 60 inmates now live. Curnier Jardin will reimagine the prison parlour room that connects the women’s prison to the outside world, transforming it into a ritualistic space for meaningful encounters. 

For press inquiries please contact: 
Maddalena Bonicelli maddalena.bonicelli@gmail.com
Grace Gabriele-Tighe grace@margaretlondon.com
Sofia Desbois sofia@margaretlondon.com
Press Kit

Playing with characters, environments or different time settings,
I shift certain elements of our reality, while maintaining others,
to create a window on a possible, yet absurd, but still
frightening, because it’s almost believable, parallel world.
I believe that it’s at the brink of contradiction, that
someone can decide what it’s true for themselves.
Giulio Scalisi
 

Case Chiuse HQ presents Like a True Gentleman, the solo show by Giulio Scalisi in collaboration with Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon.

The exhibition revolves around A House for a Gentleman, the video work in CGI that tells the story of a day in the life of a man, set in a dystopian not-so-distant future: 2048. On entering, we find ourselves in Paul the protagonist’s world, where certain elements of the display reflect his home. We hear his dialogues and his thoughts, from which the various contradictions of our own era emerge. Introspection and irony thus constitute the distorting lens through which Scalisi explores our own society.
Paul lives on an Earth where the air no longer contains enough oxygen and, just like the rest of humanity, he is forced to spend most of his time indoors. Isolated and sealed in, at the same time he is observed by pervasive and taming forms of technology. This is the channel via which the outside world flows inward, from reality to social media, from interpersonal relationships to work and so on.

Paul: To wish for the unexpected in an
airlock chamber is a losing game.

The video ends where the exhibition starts. The first room displays a series of fifteen portraits of Paul, attributed to his lovers, whom he leaves with no apparent sense of remorse, ‘like a true gentleman.’ From the story, the fragility of the individual due to a lack of social interaction and contact with reality becomes evident. In order to escape his sense of alienation, Paul feeds his obsession with the representation and elaboration of his own image, expressing it through his portraits or selfies on social media, feasting on the serotonin boost given by the likes received. The portraits show a clear need to be seen¹ and at the same time represent a tool of investigation of the personality, revealing its complexity² while strengthening a sense of vanity. There is something playful and romantic about toying with one’s own image³, and this circulation fuels an economy of affection, of self-spectacularisation.⁴ The transformation of the concept of the individual, which began in the XX century, driven by social, cultural and gender forces, it is a consequence of the ever-changing dimension of the subject.⁵ Indeed, one portrait is never the same as another, and Paul’s, preserved meticulously in plastic envelopes, serve as a tangible testimony of his own existence.

Paul: They pay their toll [with a portrait], and
I’m reminded that I exist outside of my own perception.
But sometimes, to their eyes, I look like that man in my mind.
I hate that.

Moving on to the second room, we come to another element of the story: The Obelisk. It’s a dick-shaped modular living solution available in various sizes. The home and its interiors have always reflected the aspirations of its occupants, of their position in relation to the society they live in and how they wish to appear.⁶
Like in a real estate showroom, the space features posters from the advertising campaign, complete with a 3D model, designed to explain to future homeowners the efficiency of The Obelisk and its ability to provide oxygen. Each building is equipped with HOME: the virtual and omnipresent assistant constantly connected to its inhabitant, which assists, regulates, advises, foresees and oversees every possible action. It’s an artificial super-intelligence developed by Sunjob: the tech company that Paul works for, and as is often the case, it’s a technology that alters our behavior and the way we relate to reality.
The poster Do yourself a favor on the other hand explains the serious risks involved in outdoor living. It’s clear how humanity has failed to stop the climate crisis and that major corporations have gained the upper hand. 

HOME: It’s strongly recommended to not leave the house
without an oxygen mask. If you need anything from outside is
suggested to ask for a delivery or to schedule for
one of the many transportation solutions.

The inhabitants of this Earth are not allowed to freely explore the outside world, but even the virtual world they have access to – the metaverse – has its own rules and restrictions.
In addition to HOME, Sunjob has also developed a self-censorship system: SOMA. It’s an AI which intervenes in everything users do on the internet. SOMA regulates, alters and in some cases even censors all the contents put online at the source. This creates a sort of normalised and sterilised communication designed to protect the sensitivities of a global usership.

You don’t even know what you are talking about
when you have a machine talking for you!

The only way out of this control society is to disconnect all the virtual assistants and enter the dark web, where self-censorship is not applied and thought is free, but where conspiracy theories run amok. The protagonist follows one of these theories, according to which the need to breathe is the result of a mental conditioning carried out by doctors at birth. This sect, through practices of meditative apnea, encourages its followers to break away from the limitations imposed by nature so as to finally become free human beings.

Why must we breathe
when there’s no longer oxygen in the air? (…)
Why do babies cry when they start breathing? (…)
Do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
Sunjob, Damazon, Babel, Supple
and many others — the corrupt masters.
Whoever controls the oxygen supplies rules this great land.

With this exhibition, Giulio Scalisi further develops his research into the mechanisms underpinning Western society. Through a process of deconstruction, simplification and emphasis, he reformulates the alphabet of a possible future scenario, and captures the innate voyeuristic curiosity that we all share and that amuses us so as to spy on a day in Paul’s life. The result is a short circuit between the comical and the tragic. On one hand, we cannot but laugh at the idea of living in a dick-shaped house, while on the other, we cannot but empathise with the way he lives, in a dystopian reminiscence of our own era.

A very special thanks to Charlie Vezza, for the loan of the Tahiti lamp (Memphis Milano, Ettore Sottsass, 1981), and to Alberta Romano / Kunsthalle Lissabon.

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¹ JM. Prévost “Il bisogno di essere visti ” in Dancing with Myself, Punta della Dogana, Venice, exhibition catalog edited by M. Bethenod and F. Ebner, Marsilio Editori, Venice, 2018, p. 64. 
² Melissa Harris “Role Play”, leaflet the exhibition at Osservatorio, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2022, p. 2.
³ M. Bethenod and F. Ebner “Dancing with Myself in Venice”, ivi, 2018, p. 18.
⁴ JM. Prévost, 2018, p. 64. | ⁵ M. Bethenod and F. Ebner, 2018, p. 18.
⁶ D. Schreiber “At the Edge of the World. Privacy and Publicity in the Art of the Interior” in Homebase. The Interior in Contemporary Art, exhibition catalog edited by H. Zilch and L. Seyfarth, Kerber Art, Bielefeld and Berlin, 2016, p. 189.

“Who walks on two, three and four legs?” asked the Sphinx at the entrance to Thebes. The question remains open.
Should we answer “a chair” or “a table,” the beast would certainly be at our throat in no time. We might then venture to attribute the three qualities to her, the Sphinx herself, emphasising a certain versatility with regard to her use of limbs: versatility being common to certain animal and vegetable beings, as well as to the divine. However, this kind of association would risk incurring the wrath of the Sphinx with equally lethal consequences.
Let us avoid calling other species into question. Oedipus’s solution proves to be the most obvious and convincing: the only possible solution, the only one contemplated by the enigma. A human enigma for humans to which there is no other answer but humankind.
Perhaps the real mystery lies here. How can we look at the world from a non-human perspective? How can we understand it from outside our own condition and position?
The words, these words, suggest we remain perpetually trapped in our Anthropocene. That we continue to apply human categories to everything around us, also and even more so when we try to listen to the voice of plants and the thoughts of animals, or when we become attached to a necklace, a cross or a painting. Moved by affection, exoticism, curiosity, mystique, possession and territoriality, or simply out of laziness, we inevitably act within the confines of our language, of our human domain.

A Fool with a Tool, the solo exhibition by Gaia Fugazza in Milan for Case Chiuse HQ, sidesteps the riddle of the Sphinx and sinks into another level of language: that of the body. A body materialised through painting, finding images to fill out once more amid lines and pigments. […]

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by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi

Gaia Fugazza (Milan 1985) lives and works in London. Her practice includes paintings and performance, exploring the troubled relationship of humans and the natural environment, plant knowledge, reproduction and transcendental practices. Solo and duo exhibitions of Fugazza’s work have been held at Richard Saltoun, London; Häusler Contemporary, Zurich; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Gallleriapiù, Bologna. Recent performances include Transcendence, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Super Nature in two Parts, Lisson Gallery, London; Baltic Triennial 13, South London Gallery, London; Star Messenger, LUX, London; Water from the Waist Down, Kunsthall Oslo. Her work has been featured in several Biennales and institutional shows such as the 13 Baltic Triennal, Glasstress, Venice; Mediterranea, Milan; The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery; Hrm 199 Ltd, Tinguely Museum, Basel. Fugazza collaborates with other artists and curators to create alternative ways to present works such as the furniture line with Assemble, the web-site Post from the first Lockdown, the party My Night of Unlimited Favour and Grandine the exhibition program that she hosts in her studio.

The magic I see in photography is how a real object could become another reality on paper. It is so much more direct than an interpretation. The viewer makes the connections. It is an illusion when printed on paper, but it is not an illusion when I am in the set moving the pieces around.

Barbara Kasten, excerpt from Interconnectedness of All Things in conversation with Andreas Beitin, 2019

Barbara Kasten was born in Chicago in 1936, but moved to Arizona where she graduated in painting and later in Sculptural Textile Design at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California. In the late 60s and early 70s she spent time in Poland studying sculpture, and then in Germany where she became particularly interested in the theories of Modernism, Constructivism and the Bauhaus movement. During this period, she expanded her research into the themes of space and architecture, as well as exploring the importance of experimentation and interdisciplinarity. In 1973, she returned to the United States and settled in Los Angeles, the hub of the Light and Space Movement, which also had a great influence on her research. She began to work with photography and, having no specific training, experimented in total freedom developing a particular approach, closer to the one of the painter or sculptor.

Right from her first photographic works, a series of cyanotypes, Barbara Kasten moved away from the pure representation of reality. She began to investigate the structure and perception of space as well as the interaction between two- and three-dimensionality, the physical qualities of materials and the incidence of light. Since the 1970s she has designed and built large sculptural installations in her studio, inspired by the Bauhaus methodology. She assembles industrial and recycled materials in keeping with the Constructivist canon, while relying on the powerful spatial ambiguity offered by photography. In this creative process, the shot is taken only after a long process of repositioning the elements on the basis of the light and its reflections. We can just imagine this sort of dance performed by the artist moving on and off the set, shifting lights, plasterboard or Plexiglas panels, screens, columns, mirrors, tables, chairs and other elements. Her aim is to make the most of both roles – that of set creator and photographer – on both sides of the camera, which unlike the composition before it, is never moved and is always strictly analogue.

All her photographic works, both those created in the studio and those shot inside iconic buildings, derive from this careful and complex performative interdisciplinarity, in which photography, painting, sculpture and architecture all converge. In order to obtain an image through the composition of three-dimensional objects, the artist applies a sort of dematerialisation of the object, flattening it into photographic two-dimensionality. The work thus undergoes an alteration, a transience that evokes the perspective-spatial clarity of the initial arrangement, distorting space thanks to the use of mirrors or transparent surfaces and their intrinsic ability to direct light. Indeed, for Barbara Kasten, light has always been the most important element. Its function is to bring sets to life, cast shadows, make the surfaces of materials vibrate, and it is thus the primary means by which she transforms reality.

Case Chiuse HQ, in collaboration with Bortolami Gallery, New York, and Kadel Willborn Gallery, Düsseldorf, presents a selection of Constructs, large-format Polaroids the artist worked on between 1979 and 1986; three silver gelatin print from the Double Negative series, 2012–2016; and two large works, Collision 122(2019) and Transposition 12 (2014), both salt-sensitive chromogenic prints. All the works in the exhibition underline the continuity in her research, one in which the shapes and dimensions of the objects, the scale and the three-dimensionality of the original installation are completely transfigured in the photographic image, revealing itself to our eyes as an abstract ‘construction’. 

Barbara Kasten has been using abstraction for fifty years to create new models of interpretation of reality, questioning the very perceptive ability of the viewer. Asking for attention in the act of looking in order to perceive even what is ignored is actually the political message underlying her work.

Barbara Kasten was born in 1936 in Chicago where she lives and works. She graduated in 1959 from the University of Arizona and in 1970 from the California College of Arts and Crafts, obtaining a scholarship in sculpture from the Poznań academy, Poland. Major international institutions hosted her solo exhibitions, among the most recent: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2020); MOCA Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Art Museum The Graham Foundation, in occasion of Chicago Biennial (2015); ICA Philadelphia, Philadelphia; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; MoMa, New York (2014); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; MCA Chicago, Chicago (2013); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington. Her works are part of important collections such as: MoMA, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute, Chicago; Smithsonian Art Museum, Washington; MOCA, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London.

Case Chiuse HQ presents Abrigo de Luz, the first Italian exhibition by Alejandro Corujeira who, in turn, invited Giorgio Griffa to join him.
At the beginning of our dialogue with Corujeira, we asked which Italian artist he particularly admired. Without a moment’s hesitation he told us with deep awareness of the work of Giorgio Griffa, who accepted the invitation to participate with a “spark”: a canvas of 1970. 

Corujeira’s abstraction is balanced and deeply pondered. The artist’s complex and delicate process engages with pure painting, drawing, literature, poetry, music, numbers, dreams, memory and science.
Combining pencil, graphite, acrylic, watercolour, the artist’s sinuous lines undulate and intersect over fields of colour forms and cellular silhouettes. Corujeira fills the canvas through layers of semi-transparent paint, giving geometric forms and colours a weightless nature. With these few elements, his work successfully captures a never-ending sense of rhythmic and palpitating movement, inviting the viewer to live an experience of absolute contemplation.

Case Chiuse by Paola Clerico thank Cecilia Brunson Projects, London, for the precious collaboration and Archivio Giorgio Griffa, Turin, for the brilliant participation.

About Mirages and Stolen Stones is a video in three acts by Natália Trejbalová. The artist brings the viewer to some remote landscapes between her studio and the end of the world. The borders one sees from frame to frame belong to a land that is mysteriously getting flat: our land, Mother Earth, as seen from a screen.
Embracing the paradoxes of Flat-Earth Theories and those of the two-dimensional representation of physical space, Trejbalová makes a fictional scientist investigate the new geophysical conformation of the Earth, the inexplicable creation of the Edge and, lastly, the Great Rainbow at the end of the world. Little by little, the subjectivity of the narration takes over science, which leaves the place to science-fiction. A certain proximity between counterculture and conspiracy theories emerges between the lines. In the middle of these two poles, between 360° and 1°, About Mirages and Stolen Stones mixes the meanders of miniature sets with the abysses of the open sea.

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by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi

The video is produced by the artist and Case Chiuse by Paola Clerico.

Direction, Editing, Script: Natália Trejbalová
Cinematography: Matteo Pasin
Soundtrack and sound design: Matteo Nobile
Voice: Melissa Ghidini, Adele Altro
Color correction: Matteo Finazzi

Robby Müller’s solo exhibition Like Sunlight Coming Through the Clouds at Case Chiuse HQ is curated by his wife Andrea Müller-Schirmer. The show follows major exhibitions of his film work at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, as well as presentations of his Polaroids in Arles, Rotterdam and Amsterdam.

Robby Müller is internationally acclaimed for his ground-breaking cinematography for independent directors such as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier, on films such as Paris, Texas (1984), Down by Law (1986) and Breaking the Waves (1996). On these films, but also on films by William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich, Sally Potter and Michael Winterbottom, Robby Müller built his reputation as a fearless experimenter who preferred to shoot spontaneously everything that caught his eye on the moment rather than construct shots in advance. Müller succeeded in uniting narrative, atmosphere and image into a single whole. He became known for his virtuoso handling of light and shade, for which he preferred natural light.

The show at Case Chiuse HQ reveals a lesser-known part of his work and features vintage Polaroids and a wide range of Polaroid photos as edition prints. The larger format of these prints reveals the incredible details that Müller was able to capture in the instant medium. The works show Müller playing with and exploring the properties of light and colour with a preference for photographs taken at twilight – the ‘blue hour’ – when natural and artificial light meet.

Müller never left home without his camera, and after he had become familiar with Polaroid photography on the set of Alice in the Cities (dir. Wim Wenders) in 1973, the Polaroid camera accompanied him on his travels. He built up an extensive archive of Polaroid images which he took during the rare moments of respite from work. When he was not completely immersed in his day job, he took his Polaroid camera and began capturing the everyday objects he saw around him, such as magically lit hotel rooms, American cars and urban sceneries, abstract patterns in cityscapes and the play of light in motives like trees, flowers and self-portraits. He was always looking for the one particular situation of light or observing the characteristics of reflections. 

Seen side by side, these photographic works from the early 1970s to the late 1990’s offer a broader view of Müller as a visual artist, with the Polaroid works complementing and going beyond his cinematographic work. Like Sunlight Coming Through the Clouds highlights Müller’s ability to create iconic images that represent not only his unique view of the world, but also his talent for creating something new and more radiant. This show clearly establishes the link between his Polaroids and the films Müller made. In these captured silent moments, one can sense the same poetic sensitivity that suffused his cinematic imagery and led many to dub him the ‘master of light’.

Alongside the Polaroids, a compilation of images from Claire Pijman’s documentary Living the Light – Robby Müllerwill be shown. These images from Robby Müller’s private archive give us an insight into his playful way of sensing the light in the world around him. Displayed on a cube TV, the images enhance the atmosphere of the Polaroid world.

The completed documentary film with a score by Jim Jarmusch’s band SQÜRL had its world premiere at the Venice Biennale in 2018.

Robby Müller (Curaçao, 1940 – Amsterdam, 2018) Born in 1940 on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, then part of the Netherlands, Müller grew up in Indonesia and the Netherlands. In the early sixties, he studied at the Netherlands Film Academy. Müller made significant contribution to the success of an entire generation of independent film auteurs and won acclaim for his innovative camerawork and virtuoso lighting. His illustrious career was marked by collaborations with directors Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Lars von Trier and Steve McQueen. Müller died in Amsterdam in 2018.

On February 12th we inaugurated the exhibition Case Chiuse #08 in our new space in Milan to celebrate together with all the artists and all the people who have collaborated with this project so far.
Case Chiuse #08 also marks the opening of our new studio, a physical hub where our activities will continue to unfold in respect of the key concepts dear to us: flexibility, experimentation and that search for a certain lightness capable of suspending us – albeit only for a moment – in a not strictly codified time.

Case Chiuse by Paola Clerico started in February 2014 as a wandering platform of artistic production. For six years, we devised and staged exhibitions, occupying private and inaccessible places, opening them to the public for the duration of the exhibition. All projects were conceived in close collaboration with artists, galleries and curators who worked at our side with great passion. This ‘wandering’, both physical and mental, proved to be the source of great freedom and inspiration. It will remain a primary connotation of the work of Case Chiuse, both for the projects held in our new space and elsewhere. 

Tarek Abbar, A Constructed World, Roberto Coda Zabetta, Gabriele De Santis, Nick Devereux, Tamara Henderson, Carlo Valsecchi and Nico Vascellari have been invited to take part to Case Chiuse #08, with complete freedom in proposing the artworks. The intention is to celebrate the work of each artist and the work carried out together, without seeking a collective title or a common thread.You are hereby invited to cross the threshold of the new space and let yourselves be taken on a personal journey where everyone may find his or her own narrative.

Like in previous editions of Case Chiuse, we intervened in the space in Via Rosolino Pilo 14 with minimal technical and functional renovations. These choices are determined by the desire to avoid a pre-defined exhibition container, in favour of a flexible space, adaptable and modifiable according to the needs of the artists and future projects.

Were there a leitmotiv in all this, I might dare to seek it out in the attempt to redefine our gaze.

Paola Clerico