 Similar Encounter, 2008 installation, la rada Nils Nova Similar Encounter Dixit Andy Warhol, "I'm sure I'm going to look in the mirror and see no one, nothing. People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?" To this, Nico - the legendary voice of The Velvet Underground - answered, "I see you, I'll be your mirror." Yet such a reply twists the question, circles around the solution, and leaves the matter unresolved. Whether in Narcissus' tragic destiny or in Lacan's theories, in Las Meninas by Velazquez or in texts by Foucault, in the windows painted by Vermeer or in the work of Pistoletto, the mirror persistently attracts our attention, delighting and bewildering it at the same time. While it was the ultimate metaphor in Renaissance painting, it is today the symbol of self-reference and meta-critique in contemporary art. The specular image indeed captures our gaze and instantly drives it away, offering its exact, ephemeral and unique replica. Jacques Lacan considered the mirror the threshold of the visible world. The reflecting surface holds two opposed dimensions in suspension, thus drawing the line between the visible and the invisible, between the immediate (perceptual) and the distanced (representational). At first glance, the reflected space seems identical to the real one; however, a virtual space appears beyond it and simultaneously thwarps that perception, creating a strangely altered, transformed and perturbing interval. In his conference, Des espaces autres (1967), Michel Foucault discussed the notion of "hétérotopies" (heterotopia): this described suspended spaces, represented or inversed, but effectively localizable. The disturbing experience vis-à-vis the specular image follows the sudden awareness that we are standing elsewhere, as we recognize ourselves in a suspended image beyond the reflecting surface. Nils Nova's personal exhibit at la rada confronts and develops the theme of the double through a new installation, which reveals the correspondences and discrepancies that arise in the reproduction of the similar. Using illusory perspectives, thereby increasing vanishing points, Nils Nova creates an expansive and over-flowing space. As if suspended in an ambiguous time space, the onlooker multiplies his or her glances and witnesses - as on a theater stage - a mise en abîme in 1:1 scale, where reality is challenged by ever-reconstructed mental images. The real space is virtually denied, thereby becoming a kind of exploded camera obscura: in it, the real and the simulacrum, the original and the copy are relentlessly questioned. Besides granting facsimilies an ironic and tautological dimension, this specular logic affects the sense of identity of the artist and the onlooker: Andy Warhol or Nils Nova, Al Pacino or Dario, the missing witness facing a blind mirror or the actor of a surreal spectacle? Curated by Patrick Gosatti Exhibition 9 February - 15 March 2008 Opening hours Wed-Sat 2 - 7 pm La Rada Spazio per l'Arte contemporanea ex scuole comunali Piazzetta Remo Rossi 6600 Locarno Telephon +41 (0)91 752 22 30 Email info@larada.ch www.larada.ch |
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