Careof continues its collaboration with the investment bank of the Crédit Agricole group in Italy, established in October 2012 with the aim of deepening the dialogue between art and business. In this regard, every four months, the spaces of the Milan branch host the work of young artists selected from among the many present in the contemporary art archive DOCVA – Documentation Center for Visual Arts.

Following the visionary painting of Silvia Idili (September – December 2012), from January to April 2013 the project FakeLake by the artist Marco Strappato (1982 Porto San Giorgio, FM) takes place, revolving around the concept of the imaginary.

Strappato’s artistic practice – attentive to the devices of vision and the relationship with the images that flood our culture – often originates from the continuous flow of preexisting representations. Extracted from magazines, cinema, the web, and documents of various kinds, the images are subverted, manipulated, and reformulated to re-present reality through collage, photography, installations, and video.

The project FakeLake focuses on the symbol-figure of the lake understood as a basin of images, a place where representations ‘precipitate,’ where materials taken from everyday life converge, selected for formal and conceptual associations, visual and textual references.

FakeLake n.1 is a suspended image, deliberately enigmatic, divided between a mirror-like surface – possibly a lake basin – and dense tree canopies. From this snapshot the project began, which has been enriched with new elements and considerations through a series of variations.

In this direction moves the installation FakeLake n. 4-8, both a display-structure and a sculpture, where five collages are mounted in close relation to each other and to the original image: from the reappropriation of the catalog cover of Mark Leckey’s latest exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London, to the reworking of an image taken by an American amateur photographer (renamed by himself FakeLake), to the reinterpretation of a still from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil.

“In my most recent works, the focus is on images of physical, mental, and emotional landscapes,” emphasizes the artist. “Our era is certainly one of the dizzying circulation of landscape-images, understood as images of desire and our need for escape. These images can be read as examples of today’s aesthetic experience between the authentic and the simulated, the exotic and the ordinary, the artificial and the natural. The result is a sort of imaginary landscape, devoid of human presence, an invitation to re-explore one of art’s topos in a contemporary key.”

Route to Elsewhere (from the FakeLake series) virtually closes the exhibition’s journey: the initial basin opens; through the juxtaposition of different photographic cutouts, the artist generates a possible horizon. The effect is one of disorientation and openness towards an indefinite elsewhere.

The third stage of the project will take shape with the intervention of Giulia Ticozzi starting from May 2013.