ExVoto
With a small preview dedicated to the work of Beat Kuert, the "Ex Voto" project is presented by the curator Angelo Crespi. For art received ”, in collaboration with the Maimeri and Skira Foundation which will produce the catalog. The presentation will take place on Tuesday 4 December at 18:30 at Mondadori Store, Piazza Duomo 1, Milan, which will characterize the Start / Mondadori project in 2019. A series of artists will work on the theme of the ex voto, that is, on the meaning and size of this fragment of popular art and at the same time on his own way of making art, giving life to a sort of itinerant collection in other Italian museums that would like to represent the panorama of Italian contemporary art.
In the quantity, in billions, of images that define our contemporaneity it is difficult for one to scratch the armor of the retina, usually the overdose of the eyeballs produces oblivion, and the visual binge at the most bad tearing. Yet when they are grown up, artists succeed in the miracle of imagining out of this incessant flow, a sort of noisy background that prevents any new vision in the era of non plus ultra. This is the case of Beat Kuert, behind him a brilliant career as a director and many forays into the world of video art, whose work takes place on different conceptual and performative levels and only at the end, after a long work, does it translate into rare photographs evocative power, as in the case of those exposed here that retrace, almost in a desecrating tone, the popular devotion of the x vote.
Beat Kuert's images, of which we recognize the merits of German expressionism and the telluric force of Viennese actionism (two worlds close to the Zurich artist by language and Heimat), are in fact the result of stratifications, formal and temporal manipulations, images surprising on the point of crumbling, scratched, overexposed, in which several floors intertwine to form a further one that does not exist if not in the artist's eye, images that in their aesthetic result, between white / black and color, mirrored and rough surfaces large and small dimensions strike the viewer and force him to a profound reflection on what the body is, what is the space that contains it, what is the time that annihilates it. (Angelo Crespi)