Federico Luger is pleased to present the solo show by Igor Eškinja The Day After, the third exhibition by this Croatian artist to take place at the gallery, curated by Giorgio Verzotti.
The Day After gathers together the works made for the Pomodoro foundation for a solo show that never happened because the institution was forced to interrupt its activity. Above all, the works by Eškinja, which start from ephemeral and complex site-specific situations related to the foundation’s space, speak of the force and vitality of an art that overcomes time and resists the fleeting changes of the social and political human context.
Eškinja has created a series of photographs in situ, superimposing real windows on the place’s usual geometry: visual remnants, as though the camera’s eye were fooled in order to allow the viewer to see possible spaces beyond the hedgerow. In fact the artist has felt the need to construct new contexts in order to adapt his representations in such a way that the work – the photograph – might be the final product of a sculptural and three-dimensional operation: in this way reality and visual space ambiguously coexist, both indissolubly united. In Eškinja’s work the manipulation of the architecture and its geometry (in a non-invasive and non-irreversible form: in fact after the photo has been shot the setting is returned to its initial state) is the artifice underpinning his meta-theatre; and the artistic fiction becomes the representation of a short-circuit between all possible perspectives.
In condensing a complex installation work in a shot lasting a fraction of a second, or in the task of building a set from discarded materials, like the sand used for the moulds when metal is being cast (the spaces of the Pomodoro foundation were once a foundry), Eškinja’s works underline the transitory and fragile aspect of constructing sense – but also his wish for the vigorous impulse necessary for grasping time and forcibly retaining it until the day after.
As a complement to the show there will be a catalogue with essays by Daniele Capra and the curator Giorgio Verzotti.
