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BIO Robert Pettena
Robert Pettena
Born in Pembury, he lives and works in Florence.
“While I am shooting with my video-camera or taking a photograph, I try to establish a relationship with the object in front of me and to represent it as it “appears” and interacts with space. Often its inner significance does not correspond to the outer one. The inner and outer parts of a body or an object often do not converse at all, but are divergent and become two extreme aspects of the same image although they cohabit in it perfectly.
I have always shown the inner/outer duality in my works. The outer part of the installation, which I consider the shell of the work, becomes explicit and, at the same time acts as a container to something which is unfamiliar to it. When the apparent separation dissolves, the two components are forced to converse. The objects usually do not show their inner part as if they intended to obstruct the viewer’s perception of the relationship which exists between the epidermis and that which it covers. The same way that communication between our own inner and outer parts is not a mirror image: there is no correspondence between our thoughts and the part of them that we manage to transmit. Yet a bond exists and functions according to rules that escape or are obscure to most of us: the relationship between the two parts of our being contains surprises and forces us to investigate. The disagreements that are created in the cohabitation of divergent elements are what interest me: I try to recreate these sensations in order to launch them a live-saving “ring” so that they can be observed. The shifting of one’s own body draws attention to the spaces surrounding it and inspects them for finding a possible recovery. Thus one’s own existence establishes a dialogue with the place. Recognition of what links one’s own existence to the rigid body accentuates the confrontation between life and death. The eye registers the data, navigates in an attempt to lend visibility to the appropriate phenomena, and to foresee a possible physical and sensorial relationship with space.
A video-camera is an instrument for recording, for capturing one’s own latent inclinations. The behavioral material resulting is able to survive thanks to the image projected onto objects, inconvenient inhabitable modules. So dialogue becomes necessary, an image, virtually animated, rests in free zones, in hostile spaces. Violence, the obstinate will to inhabit them, draws one onto paths generally avoided a priori and, therefore, unknown. The shells that enclose the images suspended in their incessant happening undermine, deviate the end, the conclusion of the natural cycle: thus the object can become the shell, the habitation in which the image survives. Approaching linguistics related to the subject of death, attempting to touch on its consequences, does not necessarily have to be unpleasant; it is precisely that isolation produced by the customs of Western culture that suffocate the voices of universes whose contents are full of vital areas, where contradictions are established and create playful architectures and new room for research. The temporal aspect is annulled in the installation since what happens is repeated until it provokes a spatial-temporal dilation, of such dimensions that it tends towards infinity.”
- Robert Pettena
Recent solo exibitions (selection):
- 2006 Under observation, Fondazione SoutHeritage per l’arte contemporanea, Matera
- 2005 Passages, QUARTER, Firenze
- 2002 Pentagon Play, Main Art Gallery, Fullerton, Los Angeles, USA
- 2000 Once again in your bones, Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato.
Recent group exibitions (selection):
- 2006 The Food Show: The Hungry Eye, Chelsea Art Museum, New York, USA.
- 2005 Prague Biennale 2, side events, Praga
- 2005 CLIP.IT, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino
- 2004 On air: video in onda dall’Italia, Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Monfalcone, Gorizia.