Fondazione VOLUME!

The exhibition at the Saint-Étienne Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain pays homage to 18 years of activity of the VOLUME! Foundation, Rome, raising essential issues linked to art spaces.

The Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Étienne pays homage this year to the VOLUME! Foundation. Far from contenting itself with a retrospective of all the best things that have happened in via San Francesco de Sales, in Rome’s Trastevere quarter, the exhibition conceived by the Museum’s Director, Lorand Hegyl, and the founder of VOLUME!, Francesco Nucci, takes up several challenges and raises essential issues linked to art spaces.

**Top**: “Fondazione VOLUME! Passaggi”, view of the exhibition, Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporaine Saint-Etiénne Metropole. The work by Sissi and Christian Boltanski. **Above**: Pedro Cabrita Reis, *La Maison de Saint-Étienne*, 2015. Clay bricks and mortar, variable dimensions (site-specific). Photo João Ferro Martins

The first deals with the purpose of the exhibition itself at Saint-Étienne: how to explain the essence of VOLUME! away from home when paradoxically its place has such an important role in the exhibition’s reflection? Its normal place is a relatively enigmatic one, and hardly corresponds to the purified rooms of galleries or museums. The fact of being forced to go down a few steps, to follow a route and never being able to forget the heaviness of the structure, are constraints which the painters have to overcome to gain their freedom, especially when the walls steeped in their peculiar odour bear the history of a quarter like that of Regina Coeli.

Set design by Anomia Studio for the exhibition “Fondazione VOLUME! Passaggi”, 2015, view from above, rendering

The second is how to look back over eighteen years of creation: how to let all the artists play the same score when they have been succeeding one another year after year?

VOLUME! has never staged exhibitions in the traditional sense of the term – and in any case Francesco Nucci prefers the word “work” – but rather, a reinvention of space. Many of the 61 guests invited to Rome were heavily influenced by the city’s architecture. “For an artist, a marvellous opportunity is afforded by this idea of a place offered completely, explains Gregorio Botta. Furthermore, they let you work with enormous care”. The expertise of the VOLUME! Foundation thus accompanies the work by making available not only the necessary practicalities, but also by establishing a new relation with time. Nucci in effect regards slowness as a virtue, clearly in contrast to the pace of today’s world. In fact, the artists are extremely grateful for this privilege, which enables them to experiment with untried plastic forms. Botta explains enthusiastically that “VOLUME! gave me my Circolo d’acqua (“circle of water”): I could never have done it without VOLUME! What a wonderful gift that has been for me!”.

One of the stakes played by the Saint-Étienne exhibition is its refusal to literally re-stage what had already been done five, ten or fifteen years ago in Rome, with the aid of photographs or other precious records held in the Foundation’s archives. In effect, the Musée shows images that are a reflection by the artists on their work done at VOLUME! According to Nucci, who is a well-known neurologist besides being a collector and commissioner: “This is a mental museum, all starting from how the brain functions as a memory that not only stores but diffuses. Even when time is completely erased. Like all memories, these too are faded, blurred and altered.... This said however, it is nice to see works interacting with the mind. Every person different from the next is looking for a story of VOLUME!”

Now how do you escape a mere assembly of heterogeneous installations and manage instead to create a coherent scenographic device? The architect Gianluca Nucci (ANOMIAstudio Architecture) has succeeded with brio in this feat by creating a veritable village: “This idea sprang from the necessity to mount a group show, while preserving the individuality of each exhibitor. While driving to Saint-Étienne and looking at the villages on the way, my father had this idea”. Among the imperatives set by the young architect was that of tracing the most random possible route, as occurs with memory. There is no really precise route”. This implies moreover not taking into account a chronology of relations among the artists themselves. As in a village therefore, there are individual spaces, passages, meeting spaces and also “the necessity to insert an element of worship” – the baroque chapel built by Valery Koshkyakov in Saint-Étienne when her original rough sketch had been for something quite different. Francesco and Gianluca Nucci in effect proposed that the artists might create smaller models of the house before some of them decided to rethink the whole thing once they were on the spot.

Some, like Nunzio, decided to reject this dwelling space in order to recreate another: “I have always had this idea of a house without a roof or floor. If you come to my studio in Turin, which does have a roof and a floor, you will find above it a house. And the house, made of wood, has neither a roof nor a floor. It was a real house that became something else, the idea that a work can be what you have around you. And so in Saint-Étienne the artist has installed his Sarai d’ombra (2013), “a work on transparency, the harem, the idea of seeing and being seen, and of transparency whereby, depending on what is illuminated, the space is perceived in different ways. It is the place of desire, of observing and being observed.”

Pedro Cabrita Reis also did not take possession of his maisonette. “Franco and Gianluca came to see me in Lisbon and had the idea of erecting these little houses, and I myself thought I would do my own house. They were very pleased with my proposition. On a restaurant table in Lisbon I drew a sketch of how I wanted it to be. I had to integrate Gianluca’s conceptual project with a memory of my work in Rome. The result was a formidable success.

“When I was invited in 2001 by Franco Nucci, I didn’t know either the place or the person. He is a man of rare courage and passion. He told me the story according to which Piranesi’s prisons were situated next to the present premises of VOLUME! I didn’t actually care whether this was true or not. I thought it was very curious to have a conceptual or plastic relation with a historical hypothesis. So I did this labyrinth, which allowed a trajectory, a half-closed environment. There was a very melancholy light in it. As in Saint-Étienne, I had left all the debris on the ground. And practically the whole floor was covered, which produced a very particular noise, that was part of the work. The irritating, acid and bitter sound somewhat deepened the malaise and uneasiness of the place”.

The work by Cabrita Reis might be interpreted as the materialisation of a desire to escape prison walls. The bricks, products par excellence of a rational world, become receptacles of its extremes.

Conversely, the vast majority of the artists who agreed to stay inside the territory conceived by Gianluca Nucci found themselves confronted with a sudden solemnity of immaculate space. Gregorio Botta for example delivered one of the most sensitive works, whose introspective impact mingled with the desire to participate while using universal forms. The Circolo d’acqua shown at VOLUME! in 2009 “sprang first of all from my obsession with circles and circularity, but what strikes me most is the possibility of painting using only light. So that the reflection of light on the wall creates this ring which is there, like breathing and its rhythm. The water stops, and moves. The intention was to look for a place, a slightly metaphysical yet inaccessible spot. You see it but you can’t enter. As if it was a living organism”. In Saint-Étienne, the maisonette becomes almost a temple: “To me, now it is actually a different work. As if it had added an atmosphere of sacrality which at VOLUME! wasn’t there. Here there is the sacred summit that manages to be essential”.

The work shown by Olaf Nicolaï, Un Chant d’amour, likewise acquires an entirely different dimension. At VOLUME!, this artist too was very struck by the proximity to Regina Coeli, and he constructed his project on the basis of the scene by Jean Genet during which two prisoners share a cigarette from different sides of a wall, using a straw. His minimalist intervention – the fact of exhibiting a McDonalds straw – merely enlarged the density of the space and its weight on beings. At Saint-Étienne the artistic act dominates the space, since this desire for freedom symbolised by a diameter of a few millimetres is actually a pretext for the construction of the building around which the public walks to see the two faces of this same reality.

In actual fact, rather than being the story of VOLUME!, the exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Etienne’s provides for the first time an overview of the last twenty years of creation in Rome, which is moreover a very male story. Besides, the fact that women are so few among the 61 artists invited by VOLUME! reveals a reality which Rome often prefers not to mention or to hide, perhaps because the capital has had no opportunity to reflect on its own recent history. Whilst the 1970s are celebrated, nobody has to date spotlighted the interactions between the different artists regularly present today. Now VOLUME! avoids a pitfall by not using the well-worn terms “Arte Povera”, “Transavanguardia” or “New Roman School” and by not confining itself to Italians alone.

The creations by people like Kounellis or Baruchello are shown alongside those of foreigners of all those generations, for whom Rome plays a very sensitive role, as a fecund and protected territory. A situation due in part, according to Olaf Nicolaï, to the way in which collectors are involved. Thomas Lange, who was invited by VOLUME! this winter and who showed his “Vuoto” at Saint-Étienne, eagerly expressed his delight with this subject: “I am so excited, and really thrilled to be included in this programme, but also moved by this testimony of friendship shown by the Nucci family. The Venice Biennale ought to be like this! Because this is an exhibition of art, not of politics. Now we are surrounded, beyond the market, by the fact that the artist becomes a servant to mock politics. Instead, the Fondazione VOLUME! loves painters and wants to serve ideas about art. Where the questions are answers to: who am I, where am I going, how have I been?”.

until 20 January 2016
Fondazione VOLUME! – Passaggi
MAMC – Musée d’art moderne et contemporaine Saint-Etienne

Fondazione VOLUME!

The exhibition at the Saint-Étienne Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain pays homage to 18 years of activity of the VOLUME! Foundation, Rome, raising essential issues linked to art spaces.

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