Molten Doorknobs and Cow Fat: Artissima 2023 Highlights

Italy's premier contemporary art fair Artissima opened last week to seasoned collectors from the country's scene. On the ground, historical pulls remained strong with the majority of exhibitors catering to more traditional, local tastes that edged towards the visually pleasant.

Works from artists such as Hudinilson Jr. and Alejandro Cesarco nonetheless pushed physical and conceptual boundaries while responding to their respective contexts. Their appearance hints at Artissima's measured move towards international market sensibilities. We share highlights from this year's edition below.

Hudinilson Jr., Untitled (1982) at KOW

Marginalised identities and political causes found expression at KOW's booth, where sensual collages by Hudinilson Jr. illustrate the life of an outsider artist and gay man facing the conservatism of Brazil's military dictatorship which lasted from 1964 to 1985, with media censorship made official in 1968.

Hudinilson Jr. was part of the group 3NÓS3 with artists Rafael França and Mario Ramiro, who collectively enacted defiant performances such as Ensacamentos (Baggings) (1979), for which members climbed public statues in São Paulo at night and covered their heads with trash bags.

Among the artist's later works are collages made with photocopies of his own body parts, made by lying nude on the photocopier plate. Hung above the artist's crumpled underpants, Untitled (1982) shows the artist's open palms gesturing toward a halt, juxtaposed against close-up, abstracted views of his lips. The figure's identity is withheld; the image at once expressive and secretive. A nearby retro television screened a work by American feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer, forming a presentation recalling art's capacity to return agency to individuals who are at odds with the social and political norms of their time.

Alejandro Cesarco, Picture #25 (2007) at Galleria Raffaella Cortese

Shown with the gallery online, Alejandro Cesarco's text work attests to the strength of language to convey the nuances of subjective experience as well as any image—a sentiment reinforced by Galleria Raffaella Cortese's all-text presentation with artists Marcello Maloberti, Monica Bonvicini, and Simone Forti, among others.

Cesarco's practice explores how meaning is created as we speak, read, cite, and translate. Written assertions (and omissions) feature prominently across the Uruguayan artist's work, which commonly makes use of paratextual devices such as indices, footnotes, and dedication pages, recognising the different ways information is organised and recorded.

Picture #25 (2007) reads like a stage direction, mirroring Cesarco's video works that deal with memory and its fallibility. Against a faded grey backdrop, a cut-out strip of text stands in for the contents of a hypothetical photograph. The image relies on syntax to position the viewer in time and space, placing them in a setting 'where family photographs once hung'. As memory dissipates with time, Cesarco's one-line impression recalls what is left behind.

Dale Lawrence, Ends and Beginnings (Mountain Fire, Cape Town, 22.06.08) (2023) at RESERVOIR

Presented at South African gallery RESERVOIR's booth were Dale Lawrence's poetic text-on-paper works coated in thick layers of epoxy, and a foreboding grey 'painting' composed of cow fat and veld fire (wildfire) ash.

Textured with craters and crevices, Ends and Beginnings (Mountain Fire, Cape Town, 22.06.08) (2023) appears to fossilise the devastation of wildfires that have ransacked regions of South Africa, such as the 2021 Table Mountain fire and recent veld fires in the Northern Cape.

While sculpted fat can be beautiful, Lawrence has described: 'Underneath lies a painful contradiction as the life force of the material—its healing, feeding and wealth qualities—are inextricably linked to the violence carried out on the animals to obtain this material.'

The painting is among a series of textured surfaces by Lawrence made with the same animal product and vegetal ashes. They pose a strong statement, not only on the potential outcomes of ecological crises, but the role of art itself in a world headed towards climate catastrophe.

Charlie Warde, Performance Painting (2023) at Cable Depot

On a magnetic wall inside Cable Depot's booth were Charlie Warde's small paintings of partial landscapes, which were activated through performance by artist Daniel Nicolaevsky Maria. Different configurations of the paintings appeared as part of a sequence that saw Nicolaevsky Maria kneeling, rolling on the ground, and shuffling the works around the metal sheet.

Warde's new 'Modulor' paintings stem from the artist's interest in postwar architecture. The project follows the 2021 exhibition Playtime at Cable Depot, for which Warde invited ten arts professionals to manipulate and rearrange a grid of modular paintings conceived according to the architect Le Corbusier's Modulor Rule. Le Corbusier's tool suggested ideal proportions for modern buildings, which Warde recovered to present an argument against the French comedy film Playtime (1967) by Jacques Tati, which viewed modernism as a threat to traditional family life.

With surfaces modelled after a demolished Brutalist estate in East London, Warde's moveable paintings introduced a shifting urban landscape in which the comfort of bourgeois domesticity, subverted through moving paintings, appeared to be set aside for the functional demands of modern life.

Luciana Lamothe, Adentro 5 (2022) at Galerie Alberta Pane

The molten sculptures of Luciana Lamothe embrace architecture and the legacies of the industrial age—a refreshing contrast to current artistic trends of looking towards nature as an avenue of authenticity.

Steel railings, metal scaffolding, and oxidised pipes are among objects Lamothe has transformed—into delicate coiling forms with their surfaces burst open like a bouquet, or arranged in architectural installations. With the tempering of functionality, there is beauty to be found.

At Artissima, a more subtle intervention was noted in Lamothe's 'Adentro' (Inside) series (2022–2023). Adentro 5 (2022) comprises a bronze doorknob burnt to its core, while in Adentro 6 (2022), a chipped bronze drawer handle infers a fragility rarely associated with its materiality.

These are a part of Lamothe's series of modified household structures, altered to the point of being dysfunctional. Each is made through an alchemical process whereby hard materials take on delicate appearances after being reshaped through welding and torquing. Lamothe will represent Argentina at the 60th Venice Biennale next year. —[O]