On Saturday 3oth November 2013 at 4pm Galleria S.A.L.E.S. is proud to inaugurate Ragamala, the fifth personal exhibition by Stefano Arienti at the Gallery.

Ragamala, which letterally means “garland of ragas”, is a word taken from the terminology of classical Indian music.

The synthesis among the arts and multiculturalism inspire the artist and are used as a pretext to create the new works realized expressly for this project at S.A.L.E.S. The new works integrate in un harmonical way with the previous practice of Arienti, which in the last years has found consolidation around the production of big installations, through which the artist modulates his dialogue with institutional art spaces – museums in particular - (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice, 2012) and those places more tied to culture in a broad sense, like theatres (Teatro La Fenice Venice, 2012) or churches (realization of the altar for the Church of Chiesa di San Giacomo Maggiore, Sedrina - BG).

Ragamala is also the title of the big installation that Stefano Arienti has realized in the central hall of the Gallery. It is a big wall work, composed by one thousand and five hundred CD cases of albums of music from all over the world and an almost same number of empty cases of virgin CDs, with witch the artist fill up the interstitial spaces of the installation.

This work recalls the big piece Custodie Vuote (Empty Cases), presented by Stefano Arienti at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice on the occasion of his personal exhibition in 2012. With Ragamala, in the space of Galleria S.A.L.E.S. the artist expands and redefines the work presented in Venice, experimenting new installation modalities.

The installation embraces the audience in an environment intentionally left empty, where (only) the walls are covered up by (the CD cases) and where the viewers move as if they were inside the nave of a church decoreated with frescos or mosaics. Ragamala reminds a fresco or a mosaic, for its technical qualities, for its choral notes and for its nearly didactic character. A work that is also a collection, an archive of mobile knowledges, like Arienti has already done before when he explored the place of the “Library”.

In the project room of the Gallery are exhibited new works of the typology of the “drilled posters”. This particular type of works, tipical among the vastest production of the artist, presents in this occasion the peculiarity that the they are all posters of religous theme, depicting characters of the Catholic and Hinduist devotional tradition.

As Arienti writes: “Both CDs and posters are materials of the mass culture that are destined to cover a marginal role, but that at the same time are still widespread witnesses of world cultures”.

Arienti, a prominent heir of Italian conceptual tradition, explores the relationship between popular art and massification, without overstepping the borders of artistic practice, always carrying his research on the terrain of formal elaboration, that is internal with respect to the making of art.

Galleria S.A.L.E.S.
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