Campo
Curated by Barbara Casavecchia
Museo Marino Marini, Florence
9 February – 6 April 2013
Early one morning, the annual exhibition program of the Museo Marino Marini, conceived by artistic director Alberto Salvadori, continues with Campo. The exhibition is a new project by Italian artist Andrea Kvas, curated by Barbara Casavecchia, opening on friday, february 8, 2013.
Kvas intervenes in the underground sacello (chapel) of the museum. He occupies it with a new series of works, consisting of elements in polyurethane foam and wood, reworked on site and therefore “in progress” until the day of the opening. campo is kvas’s first solo show in an Italian museum.
Campo (field) refers to a space of action, a horizontal quality which i perceive as close. It is tied to a simple image. ´Sometimes i think of work as tending a garden´, writes Andrea Kvas, ´a living system, where everything (yourself, the garden) is in constant change. it is not about results; instead, what matters are effects, repercussions, evolutions, mutations, cycles. Campo also makes me think of an ‘encampment,’ of a pause in a movement – something that arrives, stops for a while and then leaves again. It makes me think of games, but also of battles. It is a conventional space set up for something, as well as, on the other hand, a place of art. Sometimes we forget that exhibition spaces are artificial spaces, conventionally used to show artworks. An exhibition does not coincide with an artist’s work. It is simply its staging, the possibility of a close encounter with it in a “neutral” environment. In this sense too, i like the word campo. it is an elementary italian word, it’s familiar. It is not intimidating and everyone can grasp its multiple meanings, without feeling forced to understand something that goes beyond what is there. this is the attitude i wish people could have, when approaching my work.´
For Kvas, work is a process that arises from the tension of the “campo” in which it takes shape: it could be the studio, or the exhibition space, which Kvas often asks to use for extended periods before the opening of a show, in order to turn it into a functional space, no longer untouched, at hand. In tennis, trigonometry, tornadoes (1991) David Foster Wallace describes the ‘butterfly drills’ performed by tennis players. They throw each other the ball from corner to corner of the court, by crossing forehands and backhands and forming an x diagram, in endless loops, so that their action becomes automatic and it allows them to “leave the planet.” The repeated practise of a technique makes it irrelevant. ´The physical processes of my work are simple and repetitive. I stay in a space long enough to forget that something in it could stop me, like a new pair of shoes, that you remember having on only for the first few days, and then you ignore for good.´
