Last Saturday was the opening of ’The Thickness of silence’ an extraordinary exhibition by Argentinian artist Diego Cirulli hosted and curated by 104 Galerie (Ikejiri-Ohashi, Tokyo) and BC Gallery (Berlin, Germany).
The exhibition presents a new and exciting body of work created during the past year for this specific occasion which includes approximately 25 paintings on canvas, 10 drawings, 2 sculptures, and a 3 dimensional audio-visual installation using virtual reality (VR).
Focusing on historical, political and societal conflict, Diego Cirulli creates work that deals with topics such as inequality, childhood, gender identity and the complexities of his country’s present, and its recent past. In addition, he works as a stage producer in the scenography department of the ‘Teatro Colón’ in Buenos Aires, which, along with ‘Theatre National de l’Opera de Paris’ and ‘Teatro alla Scala’, is one of the three major opera companies in the world. He expands and crosses into new fields of work, including ‘Animales Danza Teatro’, a contemporary dance company, where he is the artistic advisor, designer and scenography producer, and ‘Kalos’, his own workshop, where he works both as a director and as an art/art history instructor. This experience has been vital for the creation of this new show that will certainly blow your mind.
Artist Statement
“If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche.
Perhaps, the most sincere act before painting today is to be silent and remain. To remain in motion, in rotation, in wandering permeability.
Aspiring to the multiple in that which we look at; that which is fleeting, changing and formless, that which looks back at us from the cleft, pulsating worlds, tensating bodies; an identity without a face.
Losing grasp of what is supposed, finding drifting paths and inhabiting the nausea of agitated materiality, the dissolved word, the unmounted eye, becoming the cleft. Or staring into the thickness of the void that only our fingertips allow us to know.
What remains is to acknowledge the event before painting, the collective surrender to the multiple within the image, which inhabits that created space and observes us looking at it.
This collection of works invites, in discontinuous fugues, to the ritual of death and the convolution of birth, the suicidal act of our own image. To acknowledge ourselves as an event. There, where everything withers away, where everything is new. – Diego Cirulli
Diego Cirulli Performance
About the artist
Born in 1981, Bariloche, Río Negro, Argentina. Lives and works in Buenos Aires. Studied painting under José Marchi and the Villagran Brothers, and also participated in the El Calor (The Heat) art seminar, as well as portfolio reviews with Diana Aizemberg and Gabriel Baggio. Later he acquired a Fine Arts Degree with Specialization in Painting from IUNA (The Institute of Visual Arts of Argentina) and set up his own art workshop ‘Kalos’ in Buenos Aires, where he works as a director and instructor. He is also a member of ‘Teatro Colón’ and the stage designer and art director of a contemporary dance company ‘Animales Danza Teatro’ . He published the book ‘21 105 significance and redefinition of Memory Spaces’ in 2013.
Author: Fran
Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.
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