December 19, 2015 – February 20, 2016
Museolaboratorio Ex Manifattura Tabacchi
Vico Lupinato 1, Città Sant’Angelo (Pescara) – Italy
Vernissage December 19, 2015
Artist
Thomas Köner
Curator
Marco Marzuoli
Co-Curators
Rossano Polidoro, Enzo De Leonibus
Collaborator
Fabio Perletta
Press
Carla Capodimonti
Texts in Catalogue
Thomas Köner
Leandro Pisano
Marco Marzuoli
We are living beings conventionalised to writing and the semiotic superstructure of our civilization, with its plethora of regulations and codes. We are accustomed to simplification and revelation. We are idle, superficial human beings, who gave up their unique gaze for more comforting collective perceptions. Fear has taken over our life – We are afraid of the unknown, of self-awareness, of not being. Would you be able to deny it?
Experiencing Thomas Köner’s work demands appeasement and self-consciousness, a will to lose one’s way in someone else’s space – a lived space, translated into visions resurfacing from void, similar to Proustian memories in the endless flux of inner time. The epiphanies in Topografia del Vuoto are echoes from the deep, refractions of human and artistic resonances, findings of an explorer, who is taking a journey into himself, towards unknown destinations. The German artist’s work is topographic, in that it is a negation, an act of removal of the boundaries separating the ‘I’ from the space of the work, an inquiry into the possibility of a non-geography, where the viewer is a metaphysical event in the non-place of art.
Through Köner’s artistic gesture, the Museolaboratorio turns into a space of crossing sensory pathways, where lived and non-lived experiences ‘harmoniously’ co-exist: a mental landscape, where the vertical time of the work intersects the horizontal time of fruition, and the viewer, alone in the void, can explore undeletable memories. The viewers and the space, the outside reality and the artist, interpretation and expression exist in a continuum: Topografia del Vuoto is a circular shine, a testimony, a great perceptive mandala, tracing routes along the edges of uncharted territories.
