lezioni di pittura

Francesco Burattini

Heinz Mader

28.09.21 - 28.11.21

curated by Maximilian Pellizzari & Leonardo Cuccia

The exhibition presents paintings, photographs and sculptures by Francesco Burattini (Ancona, 1994) in dialogue with drawings, paintings and collages by Heinz Mader (Bressanone, 1953) and aims to question the limits and possibilities of painting and the very concept of exhibition.

lezioni di pittura develops the concept of take-away exhibition. From the day after the opening and for the duration of the show, the sold works can be taken away from the gallery. The artists, if they deem it necessary, will be able to interact with the gaps formed by integrating new works not yet presented.

In Francesco Burattini’s paintings such as Dummy, 2019 and HooHaa, 2021, motifs taken from 1990s pop culture, graffiti art and industrial machinery shapes appear together on the canvas. By deconstructing these images, the artist makes them almost unrecognisable, but in aesthetic terms they evoke the forms of their context of origin by overlapping and blending together. Burattini’s works arise from the questioning of the pictorial tradition and extend beyond the medium by contaminating photography, as in the work No title, 2021 or the context in the site-specific work Intervento I, 2021 on the window, placing themselves between the inside and the outside of the gallery, in dialogue with the public space. In Painting Lessons (technique is nothing more than a medium), 2021, the artist mocks the sacredness of technique and the artist’s authorship.

Burattini’s is a conceptual approach to painting, within which painting is only one of the possibilities to be explored. If “technique is nothing more than a medium”, it ceases to be a necessary condition and becomes one of the many different languages and forms available to the artist.

Heinz Mader’s artistic production develops from a pictorial research that investigates the very medium of painting and its mode of production. In the exhibition we can find Bianco, 2011, a layered monochrome painting, which underneath the white colour carries the colour of many other paintings that have been covered by the last layer of paint. An annulment that questions the pictorial surface as a place of representation and reflects on its status as an object. On this painting Mader presents icons belonging to postal packages and road signs, which evoke their context through the appropriation of their sign language.

The work Fonzies. Modelli Per Scienze Politiche, 2021 consists of a series of 301 drawings drawn by Heinz Mader and painted in watercolour by Greta Mentzel. When Greta expressed her desire to paint to Heinz, as the white paper made it difficult for her to start practising, he suggested that she paint over his drawings. The work was therefore developed by two authors, giving rise to new compositions in which Greta Mentzel’s watercolour painting relates to Mader’s associations of drawings and words.

In Fonzies, Heinz Mader investigates the visual linguistic forms present in information media on paper. The very medium on which the drawings were made, fax paper, is part of a communication medium. Faced with the immense amount of visual and textual material proposed by the media, Heinz Mader’s intention is to react, deconstructing advertisements and journalistic rhetoric in order to reassociate these elements in a subjective way and in dialogue with Greta Mentzel.

A metabolic response to the overload of stimuli that generates clusters of information, known as Fonzies. Images and words proposed in hermetic combinations, which at times no longer allow their source to be traced, in the same way as the well-known savoury snacks, whose ingredients would be difficult to guess even by licking your fingers. (From the slogan: “Se non ti lecchi le dita, godi solo la metà”).

Fonzies. Modelli Per Scienze Politiche, 2021, consists of an attempt to bring the dramatic information of the news, the forms of expression of politics, and those of advertisements back into a critical comparison, combining different motifs under the common denominator of drawing and painting. This way of stripping information and news of their sacredness by redesigning them manually is a linguistic appropriation that shows us some of the structures through which we understand reality. This is why, for Heinz Mader, these drawings are models for political science. A form
of politics that expresses itself in the personal need to free itself from the structures of persuasion, of control of the historical narrative, by virtue of its own freedom of thought and interpretation. Text: M.P.