Marco Conoci. “Undercover” at the Armada gallery

The post-industrial Armada spaces in Milan turn upside down. For the first time since the official opening – which took place in 2014 – interventions have been arranged strongly in order to anticipate the visceral spaces of the gallery. Spaces that have been used and often lived by artists such as Gerasimos Floratos, Ilaria Vinci, Jaya Howey, 1-0-2, Massimo Vaschetto, Drumotor, Marco Pio Mucci, Andreas Dobler, Franco Angeli and Cheng Rang.

In “Undercover”, Marco Conoci’s first solo exhibition, the artist refers to his installation project as a moment, not to a real exhibition path, a time-lapse frame in which he was involved by building rules and outlining a field of action. His intention is to get rid of habits linked with the symbolical body which is, as a metaphor, the Armada centre. The final aim is to highlight the impossible chance, for men, to belong to its own evolutionary end. At the same time, the aim is to consciously accept the fact that, by now, reality itself is already, widely simulated. His installation, composed by minimal elements interpreting the involuntary sounds of a place offers the visitors a view on invisible grids of resistance, opposition forces to the place, to its perceptive structures, transforming it into a landscape that no longer misses an aesthetics of information, transforming his methodological territory into a precise condition for acting, directly manipulating any simulacrum of reality.

The ultimate aim is supposed to be a zeroing action of all mediations, of all the connections to the environment inserting, for example, garden bells and assemblages that represent inner sounds of human, casual perception, imminent, almost as if they were hyper-real. In this context visitors find themselves into particular conditions of non-perception, non-pondering about all of the current elements, as if they turn into being already part of the place. But, as visitors enter the courtyard, one returns to have a memory or only an impression of what objectivity really is, or was. When someone comes back to dwell in it, he/she realizes the continuous structural failures of the perceptible phenomena, touched tangentially by Conoci.

On one hand, there is an undercover action of a speculative world that diverts and controls our physical and emotional sphere aiming only to expropriate it. On the other hand there is a different way of expressing objective dimensions, forced under cover because exposed to the risk of becoming a fashion or show – as happens to the bouquet of withered flowers – for the sole purpose of resurrecting its intrinsic poetry. How many exhibitions do we see planned to maximize our results and effectively entering the art production system? How rapidly are artists and works consumed? Answers, probably will never be known, but “Undercover”’s answers lie in the time of its fruition, in the moment that makes us alert.