Careof’s new exhibition season opens with the solo show of the artist Mauro Vignando, Absence Bulletin.

Refined, wildly logical, and with a restrained gesture, Mauro Vignando gathers in this project a series of new works that share stories of absence and distance. The exhibition space is dominated by the installation La Chineserie, a reconstruction of what the artist long believed to be a Chinese pizzeria.

The reproduction of the looming fake ceiling, illuminated by seven lamps, is a copy born from simple observation: suspended in midair, La Chineserie becomes an “atmospheric support,” allowing light to emerge as the primary element. The journey continues through small-scale works, in a path that unfolds between traces charged with experience and indications only partially revealed.

Obj Trv is a ready-made metal cigarette case on which a hand-engraved inscription can be read, perhaps a dedication, but erased with a sharp tool and made irreversibly illegible. Equally and irreparably lost is the youth of the artist’s parents, represented in the double photographic portrait Me. Through the superimposition of their facial features, Vignando seems to generate an impossible self-portrait, ideally composed by the “fusion” of the two parents depicted at a time before their meeting.

Even the last two works, which draw on scientific imagery, introduce an element of disturbance and a margin of uncertainty.

In Biografia romanzata di Evariste Galoise, a metallic voice reads a text about the visionary scientist who anticipated many concepts of modern mathematics. A strange Anglophone accent distorts the sentences and makes comprehension difficult, creating a gap between the written words and those spoken.
“At two meters from a mirror, the image is returned with a delay of sixteen nanoseconds”: this is the simple physical notion conveyed by the work 16ns.

Absence Bulletin is part of a broader project promoting Italian art on which Careof’s 2009 programming has focused, made possible thanks to the support of Fondazione Cariplo. In November, the final stage of this season of events will open: a selection of artists from the DOCVA Archive (Il Raccolto d’Autunno è stato Abbondante, 10.11>19.12.09), a project by Careof and Viafarini in collaboration with the Assessorato alle Culture, Identità e Autonomie della Regione Lombardia curated by Chiara Agnello and Milovan Farronato.

With the contribution of Fondazione Cariplo