Federico Maddalozzo
"Sundays"
For this year’s edition of Milano Art Week, pconp is pleased to welcome at Spazio Lima “Sundays”, a solo project by Federico Maddalozzo.
Hours
Opening 12/04
h. 6 – 9 pm
13/04 – 23/04
h. 11 am – 6 pm
26/04-10/06
by appointment
write to spaziolima @pconp.com
or whatsapp at +393478212305
In 1973 James G. Ballard, in his novel Crash, turns his attention to one of the most iconic objects of the entire 20th century: the car. Chapter after chapter we follow James, the protagonist, as he recovers from a bad accident on the streets of London and meets Vaughan, a sort of mentor with whom he shares some extreme ideas. In the era in which Ballard writes, the car is the status symbol par excellence: it carries within it fundamental elements of aggression and eroticism, desire for freedom and display of style.
Whether used for leisure or work, even today the automobile is one of the most engaging objects in our day. We are surrounded by them, parked or on the move, they are part of and have always conditioned the evolution of our horizon, urban and affective.
Ecological sensitivity is gaining space in people’s lives, in the choices of governments and businesses, inevitably leading to a radical rethinking of the way we inhabit city space. Behaviors, trends and tools are constantly changing to follow the spirit of the times. In this sense, the automobile becomes for Maddalozzo the paradigmatic object of the expression of these transformations.
In Sundays, what Maddalozzo puts on stage is a kind of archeology of the car. Traditionally a symbol of an achievement, of an accomplishment that was reached through the efforts of labor, the car was and still is, an object of boasting, something to be devoted to with care, to be personalized to the point of making it unique, consciously or unconsciously, almost an extension of ourselves. What Maddalozzo chooses to display, on the other hand, is a leftover, a remnant, a recovered artifact from a not-so-distant past: it tells of labor, industry, the alienation of mass production, but it is transformed and embellished, evoking an aesthetic tension, a search for beauty and uniqueness. The artist uses “wrapping,” a technique mostly used in the field of car tuning or simply to change the car’s color in a non-definitive way. With a simple, almost pictorial gesture, the artist covers sheet metal with a colored film: as in a drapery, the matte quality and metallic colors of the films emphasize the sculptural form of a crashed fender.
At the same time, the artist, who grew up in northeastern Italy, uses an object familiar to him, the sheet metal of crashed cars, as a metaphor to tell about society and its evolution, the middle class, the working class that, after spending the week in the workshop, in the laboratory, in the store, waits for the right moment to devote themselves to hobbies, to the care of themselves, of the house, of their objects, of the family, to their freedom. Sunday, after all, is the day when we normally devote ourselves to our favorite pastime, take our time, so much so that it has generated, in common parlance disparaging expressions such as “the Sunday driver,” “the Sunday painter,” etc.
Maddalozzo recognizes in these activities made up of relaxed gestures a romantic quality, a manifestation of the human being’s desire to ennoble himself, to manifest his identity and express himself, to find his own dimension outside the work sphere. To carve out a moment of uniqueness.
In Sundays, the car thus becomes the lens through which to read the world, a paradigm for formal, social and economic considerations.
The events at Spazio Lima are in collaboration with studio senzatitolo.
Federico Maddalozzo
Federico Maddalozzo (1978) lives and works in Berlin.
His artistic research has pursued various interests and obsessions over the years: colour theory, the significance of specific shades in relation to the spatio-temporal coordinates of particular events, and production-line errors as starting points for formal experimentation and aesthetic articulation.
More recently his research has focused on the results of our interactions with objects and environments, and our interest in protecting and preserving them. Accidents or simple wear and tear often invest mass-produced items and their surfaces with unique forms and characteristics.
Maddalozzo’s work is inspired by the observation of everyday forms and phenomena, which he carefully reproduces in sculptural installations and drawings. These unique and often transitory elements have a formal and conceptual significance that goes beyond any reference to the actual context from which the initial observations are drawn.
