The Portrait of Ourselves
Rä di Martino
Monica De Cardenas, Milan
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Première
- Title
- The Portrait of Ourselves
- Gallery
- Monica De Cardenas, Milan
- Year
- 2013
- Duration
- 2 min 30 s
- Format & Technical
HD video in loop
Edition of 3
Imagination is a place where it rains – asserts Calvino, paraphrasing Dante – an open space permeable to memory, irony, fun, and riddles, that could also serve to describe Rä di Martino’s artistic practice. In her piece The Portrait of Ourselves, di Martino uses expressions that relate to playing and shows a girl held upside-down by her ankles. The situation takes us into a fiction process of speculation. “Fiction is usually seen as an escapist entertainment”; it happens in playing, it happens in dreams, it happens in stories and you see it at the movies or read it in books. An overturning from the plane of the real to that of the fictitious under the egis of the simulation of the real, a device which inevitably grasps our attention. The young girl is upside-down, and yet she’s got a full and tranquil look. Like the figure of the hanged or hung, 12th card of the major arcans of the tarots. Despite the fact that it refers to the traitor, the figure refers to an attitude and a perspective which in fortune-telling is associated with the ability to go beyond conventions and observe the world from a more spiritual point of view. In representing the world of the dead, the human figure is upside-down as well, an upside-down world, which nonetheless reflects the real.
Rä di Martino (Rome, 1975) deals with our perception of reality and fiction, drawing attention to the absurdity of representing either. The artist’s background in theatre and her passion for film emerge not just in her videos, but in photographic and installation work. Sets, actors and props are used variously to pick apart subjects as human relationships, cinematographic traditions, the theatre of war, and the fabrication of history.
She studied at Chelsea College of Art and Slade School of Art in London, before moving to New York from 2005 to 2010, she lives now in Turin. She has shown her work in diverse institutions around the globe. She participated of the Venice Film Festival 2014 and 2017, winning the Gillo Pontecorvo Award and the SIAE Award and the Gillo Pontecorvo Award respectively.
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Monica De Cardenas
- Address
- Via Francesco Viganò 4, 20124, Milan, Italy
- Phone
- +390229010068
- info@monicadecardenas.com
- Website
- www.monicadecardenas.com
Monica De Cardenas opened her gallery in Milano’s Corso Como area in 1992 in a beautiful location between two green courtyards. The gallery quickly earned acclaim for representing and showing the work of established and emerging artists from around the world. In 1993 she showed Thomas Struth for the first time and Markus Raetz, in 1996 Stephan Balkenhol, in 1998 Alex Katz. New artists were introduced through the years like Chantal Joffe, Claudia Losi, Barbara Probst, and Benjamin Senior. Recently several young Italian artists joined the gallery: Rä di Martino, Lupo Borgonovo and Linda Fregni Nagler, who in 2013 was invited by Massimiliano Gioni to take part in the Venice Biennale. The gallery works closely with public spaces and museums in Italy, Switzerland as well as internationally. In December 2006 Monica De Cardenas opened a new gallery space in the village of Zuoz near St.Moritz, located in a historical building from the 15th Century, renovated by architect Hans-Jörg Ruch. This location provides a second beautiful exhibition space for our gallery artists, for solo and group shows, in a stunning setting in Switzerland. Here in December 2012 we showed Marisa Merz, the grand lady of Arte Povera, who recently was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale and last year had retrospectives at Met Breuer in New York and the Hammer in Los Angeles.