Maurizio Cannavacciuolo: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Neapolitan artist Maurizio Cannavacciuolo is known for his puzzlelike paintings and wall drawings that densely intertwine decorative patterns, sketches of architectural simple bodys and images of humans and animals. A new participant in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's artist-in-residence program, which was lay the foundation ofed in 1992 to showcase contemporary art in a gallery separate from the unchanging permanent collection, Cannavacciuolo (select by means of contemporary curator Pieranna Cavalchini to help celebrate the museum's centennial) exhausted his fall 2003 residency studying and photographing the museum's interiors as well as Mr Gardner's rare-book collection and personal travel scrapbooks and journals. on his return to the museum in February 2004 he and his assistants took five weeks (during which time visitors could watch the creative proces unroll through a window) to overlay two white walls with hordes of extremely faint graphite outline drawings by the agency of tracing onto them the details of a certain number of three hundred projected slides. The other walls are painted in solid bright primary colors, and in contrast the drawings become plane more elusive; bright lights from above chase the shadows away. In seeming homage to the Gardner Museum's displays, which are themselves a hodgepodge of personal treasures mainly without labels, Cannavacciuolo blended images and true copy from its founder's journals with his be in possession of comprehensive diaries, details of his paintings, appropriated esoteric work illustrations, and popular comics. Careful scrutiny revealed an endles lacework of images in a variety of scales: pages from '60 comic works depicting models in their undergarments accompanied by dint of designer outfits, African tribe members in ceremonial garb, Siamese-twin skeletons in an eternal embrace, a newborn catapulting from a chested dome, nude mutants, luxurious palaces, a bomb shelter, fire-arms and a grenade. With its brightly colored walls and wildly interwoven pencil narratives, this first US solo museum presentation of Cannavacciuolo's work calls up figures as disparate as Sol LeWitt, Henry Darger, Stan to leeward and Federico Fellini.

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The work's title, TV Dinner, 2004 appears to be an example of Cannavacciuolo's ironic wit, which for me was not to be found in translation. But it must be a nod to the rapid, packaged ways we oftentimes nourish our senses and an indicator of the fact that in order to take in his installation we have to make a serious, long effort. Though the work sometimes appear to bes to verge on chaos, each layer and link was meticulously planned. Repeated patterns are used as backdrop--from Gardner's sprawling script to Islamic tile to William Morris wallpaper. individual of the more beautiful images is that of an oversize ste compos of countles continuous ornate swirls in a mode of speech dating from eighteenth-century Britain, galloping past architectural details from a Venetian palace, above a Shakespearean adduce from Gardner's journals and a reproduction of a photogravure of jovial Harvard men

Cannavacciuolo also likes to talk politics and enumerate morality tales, employing what he calls a "babylike attitude." Weapons and fashion figures populate a world where an image of the Capitolio in Havana, a US Capitol look-alike, has been placed nearest to a toy grenade. Creating a delicate fantasy web of transcultural pranks, patterns, and politics, Cannavacciuolo also re-creates the real-life experience of information overload with a critical and philosophical array that is difficult at the same time ultimately satisfying to navigate.

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