BODY NATURE
Marta De Menezes and Dario Neira

On Friday February 4th 2011, at 18.30,
PAV- Living Art Park is pleased to announce Body Nature, the dual personal exhibition by Marta De Menezes and Dario
Neira, curated by Claudio Cravero within the Art
Program directed by Piero Gilardi.  
 
The binomial Body Nature refers
to nature understood as a body, but also to the body in the normal meaning of
the word, made up of nature and immersed in nature: a living and communicating
agent in the world. Thus the works in the exhibition are characterised by the
almost exclusive use of biological materials (DNA, proteins, cells, bacteria)
as media. Bringing into play the most recent biotechnological research, Neira
and De Menezes aim to underline how much the body has in common with the rest
of the living world, thanks to their common organic components. If man and the
world share the same nature, the body is none other than the filter through
which inner and outer dimensions can communicate.
 
Until recently, artists used biology and the
biotechnologies, for example the latest developments in plastic surgery and
tissue engineering, for purposes of provocation (Stelarc, Orlan). But today
these disciplines simply comprise a tool with which they express themselves,
rather than the central theme of their works. Filtred through laboratory
instruments typical of science, the worldviews they present are narrations that
speak of existence, that is of being – through the biological body – in a
precise context. Proteic Portrait,
the principal installation by Marta De
Menezes (1975, Lisbon; her first exhibition in Italy) is presented as an
artist’s atelier, a place of creation
and experimentation. It is a full-scale laboratory in which artistic experience
meets scientific experience, and each is functional to the other to create mArta, a proteic portrait of the artist.
The study of chemical and organic mechanisms also underlies Functional Portrait, recorded
magnetic-resonance images of the artist’s brain as she engages in a specific
activity. Again made using medical instruments such as NMR, Somato-Landscape by Dario Neira (1963, Turin) is a scan-selfportrait that offers an
“minimal” self-image, essential and organic and yet still capable of narrating
the subject’s emotions and intimity, including that of the psyche. In this same
direction, Neira’s works tell of a third nature, a dimension that
constitutes the union of art, science and the sacred, since human beings, aware
of their body processes and mechanisms, have always wondered about the
mysteries of existence and of death. Thus it is that, in the PAV courtyard, we
find Claustrum, a sound installation
on the world of the spirit that, conserved in the body and in the mind,
develops artistically through a fragmented narration, an emotional progress
marked out by words taken from Le Ceneri
di Gramsci, read by Pasolini himself.
In the
greenhouse, PAV’s main area, the works by De Menezes and Neira are flanked so
as to weave a common matrix, an
affinity that goes beyond tools and subjects that, apparently similar, blur the
categories of male and female gender. The close relation between the works may
be glimpsed from the artists’ vision of reality, as careful as it is critical,
that pushes both of them to investigate the ethical problems raised by the
medical and scientific practices used and, more in general, by the way in which
they become part of society.
 
Marta De
Menezes, Saturday February 5th 2011, will also lead visitors to PAV in a Workshop_19/Coltivare Cultura,
a laboratory experiment to discover the territory of organic matter that
comprises and builds the body: for many new and in some ways disturbing. The
workshop is part of a series of activities, organised by Orietta
Brombin, in which artists engage in projects directly and jointly with
participants. During the entire exhibition period, the PAV educational staff
will also hold TATTOO, a laboratory for schools and groups. This
activity, which rediscovers the analogies between natural signs and the typical
stylistic motifs of traditional tattooing, gives an opportunity to participate
in themes that are central to the exhibition: lab@parcoartevivente.it.