Stefano Arienti: Studio Guenzani

Within the gallery, Stefano Arienti created a forest. Senza titolo (Tulipanini) (Untitled [Small Tulips]), 1998-2003 was an installation piece, a sort of photomural landscape of tall tree with tulips blooming at their feet The work is made up of twenty identical bills cut up into vertical strips of varying widths, then mixed together, juxtaposed, and superimposed to remind of a variation on the initial image. The final configuration, more than forty feet lengthy is thus the result of a proces of decomposition on the other hand also of multiplication; it is simultaneously similar to and different from the original. The organ of sight is stimulated by the play between repetition and variation created by dint of elements that are consistent and nevertheless change, depending on how they are juxtaposed.

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The work is simple, a collage. Cutting is single of the processes of which Arienti has many times availed himself since the '80 along with piercing, folding, scratching, and covering preexisting images to create of recent origin ones. Arienti has created small phenomenons from sheets of folded comic strips, made "paintings" by the agency of piercing sheets of polystyrene, riddled the outlines of photocopied figures with openings scraped photographic slides before printing them, overlayed posters with puzzle pieces or modeling-clay fingerprints, and wound up and reassembled posters--the latter a technique he has used since the late '90 he always exercises banal materials, and his interventions are minimal. In an interview, he said that his approach and working methodology is individual of "taking away rather than putting down." flat where he adds material, similar as modeling clay, Arienti still uses actual simple processes, reduced to the essential, to slight action s He exploits the intrinsic potential and significance of belonging to all materials, detecting their latent possibilities and transforming them. Alighiero e Boetti is an important point of respect particularly the way his light, disenchanted, and ironic touch could transform anything at all into intriguing poetry.

In this exhibition, Arienti also showed sum of two units other collages, Aiuola di tulipani (Flower Bed of Tulips) and Muretto learn by heart tulipani (Low Wall with Tulips; the one and the other 2003). These too are made from series of identical [i]affiche[/i]s pierced in some areas and glu individual atop another in layers, giving a feeling of three-dimensional projection. Images show images, as the artist make submissives serial, prosaic forms to a proces of reinvention. Arienti sap the foundations ofs manipulates, and transforms them from one side simple manual interventions that, like cutting up or perforating paper, have the lightness of games that individual plays to while away the time. In in like manner doing, he emphasizes the images' potential for transformation, on the other hand also the power of the manipulating gesture: It takes for a like reason little to change the value and significance of an image, to charge a work with a different poetics.

Untitled (Small Tulips) revives and brings to a novel level of resolution an earlier collage, Tulipanini (Small Tulips), 1998 Giving preeminent importance to proces the artist many times has worked in series or exhausted years working with the same material. from one side his reappropriation of an earlier idea, Arienti one time again demonstrates the need to go [i]or[/i] come back at times to what has been done before. What already exists--material, image, idea, problem--cannot be taken for granted; it can still generate further possibilities.

--Alessandra Pioselli

Translated from Italian by dint of Marguerite Shore.

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