CHRISTIANO MANGIONE : HIEROPHANIA
FEINKOST, BERLIN
JANUARY 16 - FEBRUARY 28, 2010
FEINKOST is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Germany of artist Cristiano Mangione. Entitled “Hierophania” the exhibition presents a series of works on canvas, paper and aluminium that communicate a tender yet expressive violence. The works in this exhibition access a sensibility of brutality that is at once human-scaled and disturbingly foreign.
Hierophania, a modification of the English spelling “Hierophany”, is a term coined by the Romanian religious historian Mircea Eliade used to identify shamanic revelations of the “sacred”. In the gallery context the notion pairs well with artist Bruce Nauman’s iconic neon “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths”, a credo that still stands tall as part of artistic responsibility and a public’s expectations. By scraping away at the borders that structure our lives is to rupture a certain boundary of civilization and an action which, in doing so, reminds us of where those boundaries are located. For Mangione’s practice Hierophania is a direct reference to the artist’s often-unseen yet monumental interventions of working directly onto architectural surroundings.
Through a release of frenzied scribbling using ballpoint pens, Mangione brings the surface support of the canvas to an ethereal extreme, rendering abstract fields and primal forms by what would seem to be a compulsive necessity for their existence. Compositions of tangible energy can take up to a year to complete whereby the primed white linen is continually caressed into sloughing flakes of gesso and gossamer strands. An iridescent oil slick of viscous ink turns the resulting picture plane into a pure and total drawing, one that is a nearly prosthetic extension of the maker.
Works on canvas or paper are permeated with a sense of critical saturation suspended delicately in the moment before collapse. The work on aluminium is more elastic in the forces it can withstand and is thus gored with a range of instruments both homemade and common. The canvases and aluminium capture this seemingly ritual performative process, complete with sweat and fury. Each work in Mangione’s practice becomes a document of its own origins and is yet, more than anything, an abjection, a liminal zone and the remnants of a border.
