Bluebetakids (installation, mixed media) + On Air ( c-print on canvas, 75 x 200 cm)
Trust System Control (collage on paper, plugs, wood, 113 x 117,5 cm)
Lo stato delle cose (The State of Things) gianluca monnier solo exhibition Galleria Balmelli, Bellinzona (CH) 30.4.2009-30.5.2010 (Guardians, C-photo on canvas, variable dimensions) Lo stato delle cose (The State of Things) is the title that Gianluca Monnier decided to give to the personal exhibition which he devised and conceived specifically for the exposition areas available in the Balmelli Gallery in Bellinzona: a complete work of installation art that expresses great coherence of content. Paraphrasing the eponymous film (1982) by the German director Wim Wenders, Monnier seems to be using his work to enquire about the meaning and the reason of the eternal dispute between Art and Life. What exemplary experience, what model and means of communication, what Art can represent life, giving it a meaning we can agree on, one that overcomes its intrinsic mendacity? For Monnier, who gained his spurs in television, the art with which he has most affinity is the technological art of video, contaminated by SCART connectors, light boxes and satellite dishes: media devices whose purpose is to convey information, devices so perfect that they can be used not only to bear witness to our everyday lives, but also to make our dreams and aspirations come true. Seeing himself as a guardian of the world (The last Sentinel) - but resigned to the power exerted by the world of the media - Monnier girds his loins with technology to the extent of trying to lose himself in it (The Garden of Eden), in the desperate, paradoxical attempt to bridge the gap that separates it from the real world. It is a world that appears to have imploded through his media imagery, irremediably a-natural, yet at the same time wonderfully perfect in its ability to convey and accumulate man's images and aspirations. (Konrad, one channel video installation, wood, scart plugs, water, sound, variable dimensions) Monnier has no intention whatsoever of denying that he is influenced by its allure and actually sets out to lose himself in it, so as to make use of its power, in the - perhaps Utopian - hope that he will be able to humanise it by fertilising it (As the illusion is not opposed to reality...), so as to rediscover that innate, empathic predisposal to spontaneity (Konrad), to sense that sexual quiver, so full of generative expectations (Input/Output), or to rise up to higher, religiously flavoured spheres, so as to perceive, once again, edifying ultra-terrestrial messages (The last On-Air), to make children the objects of thinking subjects (Bluebetakids), ultimately to stabilise a system of society that makes sense (Trust Control System), that is capable of legitimising the rise of the means of communication to the status of a secular icon for our society (The Origin of Species). To reiterate the disenchantment described by Pierre Musso in his book "L'ideologia delle reti (The ideology of the Networks)" (Apogeo, 2007), when he writes that "technology is post-modern society's totem, the new cult object and its basic symbolic benchmark". Monnier dons the apparel of the solitary traveller who crosses the world in search of his ego, hoping that, by offering himself up to the perfection of technology (the sole cold certainty), he may give meaning to his pointless wanderings, like so many cries of love, dreams and hopes. Mara Folini, Curator of the Museum of Modern Art Ascona