Bruno’s House
June 14–September 28, 2024
Curated by Caterina Riva with Marta Federici.
Bruno's House is an exhibition by Salvatore Arancio that brings together a group of works—some of which are now part of the MACTE museum’s collection—inspired by suggestions and memories triggered by a visit to the Bruno Weber Park: a sculpture park built in Dietikon (Canton Zürich) by Swiss architect and artist Bruno Weber. Combining sculptures, a video and a soundscape, Arancio recomposes an imaginative journey through the architecture and presences that animate that site, where imagination is celebrated, as well as the pleasure and experimentation of art in its various forms.
The exhibition unfolds in a series of environments through the museum’s central hall and side rooms and ends in the MACTE garden, where the permanent sculpture Voyager, was installed by the artist in September 2023. Arancio’s artistic practice devises a universe that is phantasmagorical and marvellous at the same time, leaving the audience free to associate the shapes and colours with their own imagination. Without wishing to impart single interpretations or meanings, Bruno’s House opens up fields of possibilities, proposing itself as a realm that escapes the canons regulating the spaces in which we usually move. The artist’s works stimulate our sensory faculties, inviting us to explore an intuitive level of experiencing and to become active spectators.
A series of sculptures of overflowing proportions and dimensions expand Arancio’s ceramic production. The shimmering glazes, realised during a residency in Hungary, generate a vertigo of iridescent reflections and colours within each object. The sinuous and organic forms of the works evoke fragments of bodies in metamorphosis between the vegetable, the mineral and the human, and in the installation their iridescent and precious surfaces contrast with the raw material of the bricks supporting them.
The video Bruno’s House, with an original soundtrack commissioned to the British musician Robin Rimbaud/Scanner, proposes a jarring combination of lysergic images, shot by Arancio amidst the kaleidoscopic architecture of Bruno Weber Park, with a sound that brings in a dark sense of disquiet, shifting the visual narrative out of linear time. The result is a sequence of scenes that composes in its fragmented rhythm a hallucinatory journey of dreamlike visions and acidic atmospheres.
After wandering through the mirages that animate the penumbra of the museum rooms one can find outdoors Salvatore Arancio’s permanent sculpture in the MACTE gardens. Voyager appears as a seat composed of three cement blocks of different sizes tinted in pastel colours, that mimic pieces of raw clay. On different sides, bronze tiles of various colours and shapes, seem to emerge from the material: a triangular black face with an upside-down smile, a blue finger-tail and organic shapes decorating the bottom section.
Bruno’s House by Salvatore Arancio won the public bursary PAC2021—Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture in Italy.
A selection of works from the permanent collection of the museum will accompany Arancio’s solo exhibition. In particular, it will be possible to admire the triptych by Malangatana Valente Ngwenya and a sculpture by Nedda Guidi, artists featured in this year’s Venice Biennale, but also the works by Bruna Esposito and Chiara Enzo, winners of the two latest editions of the Premio Termoli, respectively in 2021 and 2023.
The public program of the exhibition also includes two special invitations to artists Marco Lampis and Francesca Anfossi. Lampis (Before the Eyes) is developing an audio guide of the exhibition for blind people, which will be made available on the museum’s website in July. Anfossi, on the other hand, will lead a sculpture workshop using bread open to adults and children, in the second half of September, with the complicity of the Istituto Alberghiero di Termoli.
