3 March 2015

Sculptures, paintings or drawings? It is hard to tell by looking at the works of the young Avery Singer, on show at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. Her “digital still lifes”—as she calls them—turn all the clichés of painting on their head and put themselves forward as the quintessence of the 2D version of three-dimensionality to which we have grown accustomed with the widespread use of smartphones and tablets. Her reality is inhabited by figures whose curly hair has been turned into geometric lines. And just like on the internet, she interweaves past and present, make-believe and actual experience. Among literary and artistic episodes inspired by the historic avant-gardes we find prosaic scenes from the artist’s own life, in which we see embarrassing encounters with critics and curators during dreaded studio visits. The effect is ironic: what the painting puts in a historical perspective is the backstage, the side of the artist that is never seen. All mediated by the computer. Singer, in fact, creates her figures with SketchUp, a program used in architecture and design to reproduce 3D volumes, and deconstructs the pictorial space with a monochromatic palette and spray paint. The result has a Cubist air and winks at abstraction, but behind every canvas from which color and realism have been banished the artist reaffirms the power of the content.

Avery Singer. Pictures Punish Words
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
A cura di Beatrix Ruf
Torino
12 febbraio > 12 aprile

Photos: Giorgio Perottino