THE CHAPEL
In 2019 Vincenzo Schillaci curated PALKO in Castello San Basilio's chapel. The group exhibition featured artists Gianni Caravaggio, Jodie Carey, Jorge Peris, Vincenzo Schillaci, Johannes Wald.
If you were to imagine an exhibition space, perhaps the first picture that would come to one’s mind would be that of a white cube, internally illuminated by cold light, virtually shadowlesss and as such, an image of timelessness. Exhibition spaces and the processes that have come to define them actively transform the cultural value of what is exhibited within them, and in so doing, become a dynamically productive room in which any idea can progress and evolve.
In exploring the relationship between life and art, the sense of the value of the art object is one that goes beyond that of a mere consideration: as Michel Henry says regarding the inherent subjectivity of the relation- ship of life with color, this is a sense of life itself. For Nietzsche, Art’s origins lay within festive celebrations and works that functioned as attempts at becoming material testimonies of certain moments within a culture whereby the normal durational experience of time passing is overcome.
PALKO wants to create a visual path through which the works of 5 different artists from diverse backgrounds are brought together in a well-defined space: a chapel.
This exhibition aims to explore the contextual effects of the physical environment on works of art, focusing more on the temporal experience in which the pauses between the works and their contents are organised to configure an unresolved image, creating a variegated point of view through the different ideas expressed by the works.
Thus the works and their informational indices exist, transmit, emit and communicate through channels not necessarily just mediated by traditional awareness or by time, but also by non-communicative effects. The choice to present these works in such a space invites the viewer to consider a different gaze at these works that when taken out of their original context, withdraw from the limits of their own actuality to trace new interpretative perspectives, escaping from any traditional global discourse on the practice of art.
Text by Vincenzo Schillaci