Carlo Vidoni

Carlo Vidoni takes part in this year’s edition of Palinsesti with two works, purposely conceived for the festival, which constitute an interesting relaunch in its creative corpus and a perfect illustration of his aesthetic research so far.
In the site specific installation Attraversamento (Crossing, 2017), Vidoni reiterates some of the more recurring vocabulary of his production: roots and branches. These elements are bundled in a chaotic order and they occupy an interstice in the dividing wall between two rooms of the castle. The intervention originated with the epiphanous meeting with the mysterious hole in the wall, which aroused the artist’s curiosity and fascination because of its condition of liminality, of being between, as a trait d’union between two spaces, thus creating surprise and estrangement. Vidoni carries on this disruptive intention with his usual humour, but without upsetting the visitor: are we in front of the interruption of nature in the household? Are we in front of the return of an (ancestral) remnant into the castle’s spaces?

The work Honey Islands (2017) is here proposed for the first time to an audience. The Friulian artist introduces his new project after a long meditation: the protagonists are bees. The soft combs, with their perfect geometries, are prepared on modelled waxed wood boards and are soaked in viscous and fragrant honey. Aside from the meta-linguistic play of a sculpture within a sculpture, it is the urgency of the message that encourages the artist to achieve a work that is both within reach and at human scale. By eliminating distances, Vidoni invites us to an interactive, tactile and olfactory experience. The installation serves as a sensorial catalyst for our reaction. The evocation, although polite, is about the serious and pressing theme of mortality of the invaluable insects whose existence is fundamental for the subsistence of the planet and its biodiversity. In this work, the wish for a triumphant recovery of physis (nature) makes room for the concern for its irreversible disappearance. The taste for the inevitable and cyclical undoing stands in opposition to the warning of a denied future. We recognise, once again, the polarities that are dear to Vidoni’s aesthetics – animal/vegetal, natural/anthropic, nature/artifice, nature/culture, absence/presence – and their peculiar overcoming, but with a different critical approach. In both works, Vidoni reiterates the idea of nature not as something “else”, something outside of us, something where fears and wishes are projected in a transfer-like approach, but as something that is part of our being, in both the material and the spiritual dimensions.

[GC]