Project Gallery

DiegoBianchi

English

1103 Biscayne Blvd. Miami, FL 33132305 375 3000info@pamm.orgpamm.org

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Project Gallery: Diego BianchiFebruary 19 – July 26, 2015

Diego Bianchib. 1969, Buenos Aires; lives in Buenos Aires WasteAfterWaste, 2015Mixed media installation, sculptures, and performanceCourtesy the artist

WasteAfterWaste (2015) is a large-scale installation by Buenos Aires-based artist Diego Bianchi (b. 1969) commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami for the Papper Family Project Gallery. The project has involved several research visits by the artist to Miami, followed by six weeks of intense production, both on-site in this gallery and at an off-site warehouse space. The immersive, sensual environment that the artist has constructed is elaborated using diverse discarded materials. He has taken this waste out of its normal state of invisibility within consumer society and repositioned it as groupings of sculptures, thereby transforming trash into art. His project addresses the specific consumption tendencies of tourist locations like Miami, while tying those to larger questions of global economies structured around impulsive purchases and the rapid use and disposal of products, which results in massive quantities of waste that is managed out of public view.

Bianchi’s artistic practice matured during the period in Argentina after 2001 when the country’s currency was devalued and it entered a dramatic economic crisis. Having proudly considered itself predominantly middle class, Argentina was faced with new realities and alternate class formations. Of particular symbolic impact to many younger artists during this period was the growth in the number of cartoneros seen in the street––people collecting cardboard and other trash items to resell. The greater visibility of these discarded materials had a particularly strong impact on Bianchi, who increasingly pursued an ethic of art making involving reuse rather than engaging newly manufactured materials.

Central to Bianchi’s thinking is the notion of the abject. A term related to psychoanalysis, the abject in visual art involves the simultaneous attraction and repulsion to the unclean, the scatological, and the excretions of the body, which we look to hide, ignore, or repress. The trash found in his sculptures––including discarded cell phones, designer clothes, shoes, handbags, organic materials, and plastic furniture––represent “abject objects” within the logic of our consumer economy, which is structured around promoting acquisitions of the new, the clean, and the shiny. This economic culture makes any product obsolete or undesirable within a time period of only a few years. Bianchi’s installation returns these unwanted materials to our view, forcing us to recognize their now degraded existence. He reinvigorates and animates them with human characteristics through his unusual formal experiments. His structuring methods are often aggressive, to the point of evoking cruelty: he cuts, burns, cements, or binds together the many objects he uses.

The compositions Bianchi engenders demand their own environments, their own unique artificial landscapes. One of the

dynamic tensions created in his work is the play between his assemblages’ call to be read as individual sculptures and their move toward being visually absorbed into the theatrical spaces in which he positions them. These installations often reference dramatic climactic conditions, storms, or natural disasters. For WasteAfterWaste, the artist has specifically blocked the view of the palm trees, park, and bay that is provided by this Project Gallery’s two gigantic glass walls, painting over the glass with a white, chalky paint that is traditionally used to cover abandoned shop windows. This gestural surface is translucent, but encloses the space, forcing the viewer’s gaze inward. Using twisting, broken, and angled walls (constructed from drywall recycled from a previous museum exhibition), the artist has imbued the gallery with a centrifugal movement and energy. All the architectural elements and materials installed within it appear to be pulled toward a tower of trash at the front corner of the room, creating a space that suggests the forces of a tornado, or the vortex structure of a hurricane.

Countering the chaotic energy generated by these elements, Bianchi has engaged the ordering device of stainless steel stanchions with retractable, black nylon bands. These objects are normally used for crowd control in museums, engaged to structure waiting lines for the public wishing to enter the galleries. For his project, the artist has used these stanchions to move viewers through his piece in a mazelike manner, while creating a geometric, three-dimensional drawing of black lines that cuts horizontally through the space.

Human bodies are continually addressed in Bianchi’s projects, most directly through the manner in which his installations choreograph the movement of visitors’ bodies and how their varied textures, surfaces, and monumental forms play to our senses. Display mannequins, industrial representations of male and female bodies produced for the fashion industry, are reoccurring elements in his works, often severed into fragments that are reassembled in strange and disturbing ways. His mannequins recall modernist projects pursued by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí, who were involved with the art movements of Dada and Surrealism at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In recent years, Bianchi has increasingly added performative elements to his projects, activating them with live bodies during the run of an exhibition. For WasteAfterWaste, he engaged performers who have tattoos on various parts of their bodies. These individuals were asked to inhabit the gallery for several hours each day during the exhibition’s opening weekend and to press their tattooed skin up against clear areas of the painted glass walls so that the tattoos are visible from the museum’s exterior. The artist sees these graphics, which are

permanently drawn on the surface of the body, as a move toward objectifying it; they help turn one’s body into an object to be enjoyed, displayed, and consumed.

Raw, rough, and, at times, intentionally crude, Bianchi’s works surprisingly aspire to convey an unusual beauty. It is not one born from harmony, calm, or effortless grace, but a beauty that emerges from the unexpected, from violence from transgression. These works continually flirt with the seriousness of art, while remaining deeply informed by and attracted to its history. Their formal sophistication is revealed slowly, as one spends more time with them. They suggest a dystopian future, but one not devoid of aesthetics; rather, they point to a future that requires a new relationship between humans and the objects they desire, use, and then reject.

Tobias OstranderChief Curator and Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs

WasteAfterWaste

Diego Bianchi was born in 1969 in Buenos Aires, where he continues to live and work. He participated in the Beca Kuitca scholarship program at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, from 2003 to 2005. He studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in 2006. His recent solo exhibitions include Suspensión de la incredulidad (The Suspension of Disbelief), ARCOmadrid (2014); Into the Wild Meaning, Visual Arts Center, University of Texas at Austin (2013); Ejercicios espirituales (Spiritual Exercises), Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires (2010); La música que viene (The Music That’s Coming), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina (2008); and Wake me up when the present arrives, Locust Projects, Miami (2007). His group exhibitions include the Istanbul Biennial (2013); Slow Burn, an index of possibilities, Spoorzone 013, Fundament Foundation, Tilburg, the Netherlands (2013); Nuevas Tendencias (New Tendencies), Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2012); Biennale de Lyon, France (2011); and Bienal de la Habana, Cuba (2009). In 2013, he presented a theatrical performance titled Under de Si in collaboration with Luis Garay in both Tacec de La Plata, Argentina, and at the Malta Festival, Poland. He currently teaches a seminar in the art department at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires.

Biography

Images: Diego Bianchi, WasteAfterWaste (detail), 2015. Courtesy the artist.

WasteAfterWaste (2015) is a large-scale installation by Buenos Aires-based artist Diego Bianchi (b. 1969) commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami for the Papper Family Project Gallery. The project has involved several research visits by the artist to Miami, followed by six weeks of intense production, both on-site in this gallery and at an off-site warehouse space. The immersive, sensual environment that the artist has constructed is elaborated using diverse discarded materials. He has taken this waste out of its normal state of invisibility within consumer society and repositioned it as groupings of sculptures, thereby transforming trash into art. His project addresses the specific consumption tendencies of tourist locations like Miami, while tying those to larger questions of global economies structured around impulsive purchases and the rapid use and disposal of products, which results in massive quantities of waste that is managed out of public view.

Bianchi’s artistic practice matured during the period in Argentina after 2001 when the country’s currency was devalued and it entered a dramatic economic crisis. Having proudly considered itself predominantly middle class, Argentina was faced with new realities and alternate class formations. Of particular symbolic impact to many younger artists during this period was the growth in the number of cartoneros seen in the street––people collecting cardboard and other trash items to resell. The greater visibility of these discarded materials had a particularly strong impact on Bianchi, who increasingly pursued an ethic of art making involving reuse rather than engaging newly manufactured materials.

Central to Bianchi’s thinking is the notion of the abject. A term related to psychoanalysis, the abject in visual art involves the simultaneous attraction and repulsion to the unclean, the scatological, and the excretions of the body, which we look to hide, ignore, or repress. The trash found in his sculptures––including discarded cell phones, designer clothes, shoes, handbags, organic materials, and plastic furniture––represent “abject objects” within the logic of our consumer economy, which is structured around promoting acquisitions of the new, the clean, and the shiny. This economic culture makes any product obsolete or undesirable within a time period of only a few years. Bianchi’s installation returns these unwanted materials to our view, forcing us to recognize their now degraded existence. He reinvigorates and animates them with human characteristics through his unusual formal experiments. His structuring methods are often aggressive, to the point of evoking cruelty: he cuts, burns, cements, or binds together the many objects he uses.

The compositions Bianchi engenders demand their own environments, their own unique artificial landscapes. One of the

dynamic tensions created in his work is the play between his assemblages’ call to be read as individual sculptures and their move toward being visually absorbed into the theatrical spaces in which he positions them. These installations often reference dramatic climactic conditions, storms, or natural disasters. For WasteAfterWaste, the artist has specifically blocked the view of the palm trees, park, and bay that is provided by this Project Gallery’s two gigantic glass walls, painting over the glass with a white, chalky paint that is traditionally used to cover abandoned shop windows. This gestural surface is translucent, but encloses the space, forcing the viewer’s gaze inward. Using twisting, broken, and angled walls (constructed from drywall recycled from a previous museum exhibition), the artist has imbued the gallery with a centrifugal movement and energy. All the architectural elements and materials installed within it appear to be pulled toward a tower of trash at the front corner of the room, creating a space that suggests the forces of a tornado, or the vortex structure of a hurricane.

Countering the chaotic energy generated by these elements, Bianchi has engaged the ordering device of stainless steel stanchions with retractable, black nylon bands. These objects are normally used for crowd control in museums, engaged to structure waiting lines for the pubic wishing to enter the galleries. For his project, the artist has used these stanchions to move viewers through his piece in a mazelike manner, while creating a geometric, three-dimensional drawing of black lines that cuts horizontally through the space.

Human bodies are continually addressed in Bianchi’s projects, most directly through the manner in which his installations choreograph the movement of visitors’ bodies and how their varied textures, surfaces, and monumental forms play to our senses. Display mannequins, industrial representations of male and female bodies produced for the fashion industry, are reoccurring elements in his works, often severed into fragments that are reassembled in strange and disturbing ways. His mannequins recall modernist projects pursued by artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí, who were involved with the art movements of Dada and Surrealism at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In recent years, Bianchi has increasingly added performative elements to his projects, activating them with live bodies during the run of an exhibition. For WasteAfterWaste, he engaged performers who have tattoos on various parts of their bodies. These individuals were asked to inhabit the gallery for several hours each day during the exhibition’s opening weekend and to press their tattooed skin up against clear areas of the painted glass walls so that the tattoos are visible from the museum’s exterior. The artist sees these graphics, which are

permanently drawn on the surface of the body, as a move toward objectifying it; they help turn one’s body into an object to be enjoyed, displayed, and consumed.

Raw, rough, and, at times, intentionally crude, Bianchi’s works surprisingly aspire to convey an unusual beauty. It is not one born from harmony, calm, or effortless grace, but a beauty that emerges from the unexpected, from violence from transgression. These works continually flirt with the seriousness of art, while remaining deeply informed by and attracted to its history. Their formal sophistication is revealed slowly, as one spends more time with them. They suggest a dystopian future, but one not devoid of aesthetics; rather, they point to a future that requires a new relationship between humans and the objects they desire, use, and then reject.

Tobias OstranderChief Curator and Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs

WasteAfterWaste

Diego Bianchi was born in 1969 in Buenos Aires, where he continues to live and work. He participated in the Beca Kuitca scholarship program at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, from 2003 to 2005. He studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in 2006. His recent solo exhibitions include Suspensión de la incredulidad (The Suspension of Disbelief), ARCOmadrid (2014); Into the Wild Meaning, Visual Arts Center, University of Texas at Austin (2013); Ejercicios espirituales (Spiritual Exercises), Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires (2010); La música que viene (The Music That’s Coming), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina (2008); and Wake me up when the present arrives, Locust Projects, Miami (2007). His group exhibitions include the Istanbul Biennial (2013); Slow Burn, an index of possibilities, Spoorzone 013, Fundament Foundation, Tilburg, the Netherlands (2013); Nuevas Tendencias (New Tendencies), Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2012); Biennale de Lyon, France (2011); and Bienal de la Habana, Cuba (2009). In 2013, he presented a theatrical performance titled Under de Si in collaboration with Luis Garay in both Tacec de La Plata, Argentina, and at the Malta Festival, Poland. He currently teaches a seminar in the art department at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires.

Biography

Images: Diego Bianchi, WasteAfterWaste (detail), 2015. Courtesy the artist.