Art Curator
Models of display
Models of display – Tonino Casula
(our most beloved techno-archaic artist)
19.11.2016 – 15.12.2016
Montecristo Project + Tonino Casula
Project-room 3
curated by Daniela Cotimbo
COLLI Independent Art Gallery, Rome
Born as the direct result of Occhio Riflesso, Montecristo Project was created by artists Enrico Piras and Alessandro Sau with the participation of other artists involved in exhibitions organized, designed and curated by the Sardinian duo.
Occhio Riflesso was born from the need to linger on the manner of fruition of exhibitions, particularly on the identification of a common language related to the physical presentation and the photographic documentation of artworks. Montecristo Project instead brings into play this analysis through the construction of events, in which the protagonists are artists chosen according to the interest, or in some cases the lack of interest, from the audience and the critics.
The project takes its name from the namesake Dumas novel, in virtue of its particular location. Montecristo Project exhibitions are on a deserted island along the Sardinian coasts. The secret location, a Spanish watchtower of the seventeenth century renovated during the Second World War for defensive purposes, allows the artists to spread the exhibitions through materials created expressly for this documentary purpose.
Currently in its second exhibition, the island hosts the solo show of the Sardinian artist Tonino Casula (born 1931) an electronic art pioneer. Well-known thanks to his works and lectures inside the artistic and semiotic academic environment, since the end of the eighties, Casula has dropped out of painting to dedicate himself to the “abstract cinema”, as he likes to define it, pursuing a radical and lonely path. For the first time, Montecristo Project presents an exhibition simultaneously on the island and inside an institutional space: that of Colli Independent Art Gallery in Rome. Through this operation, the Roman audience will be able to explore the work of Casula filtered by the eye of the two artists and receive a “guided” vision of what is happening inside the island.