The installation by Meris Angioletti for On Demand section of Miart 2017, relates together three series of works that are part of her most recent researches.

Highly tactile collages, photographs, slide projections, and tapestries create a dialogue about the characteristic conceptual basis of the work by Meris Angioletti: the relationship between mental mechanisms and linguistic forms, revelation and concealment, and film space as a ritual space, all derived from various kinds of narrative schemes. Her work has always dwelt in the indistinct space between art and science, a space where it is difficult to distinguish creative process from scientific method.

The works on show are all closely tied to an invisible and symbolic film structure, one where words are projected, images are created through colours and materials, and stories are narrated through the warp and weft of fabrics.

Works on show

1. A slight ache, 2017, digital print on photographic paper, ed. 1/4 + a.p., 33x40 cm, framed.

The image refers to one of the silent participants in the performance/conference L’anello e il libro – prologo, realised in Rome at the Palatine, Par Tibi, and Roma Nihil in September 2016, and inspired by the trial of Giordano Bruno. The ass, a favourite image for philosophers, is a symbol of silent knowledge, of possibilities for knowledge; for Apuleius it was a metamorphic path.

The photograph takes its title and inspiration from a play for the radio and then for the theatre by Harold Pinter; in it appears a silent character (on the radio) with his face covered by a balaclava. The silent presence alludes to the idea of a witness but also to that of the subconscious.

2. L’anello e il libro – partizione 1, 2017, linoleum, zinc, 150x150 cm

3. L’anello e il libro – partizione 2, 2017,  linoleum, brass, 150x150 cm

These works are part of a recent research by Meris Angioletti into combining materials as a way of putting together a story through images, and also as matrices for printing. The rhythmic and combinatory aspect of the two works is a form of meditation on revelation and concealment (such as repression or self-censorship), one which is also a collateral study of the images of the video installation in the booth.

These two works follow the form of Le grand jeu, a large installation realised by the artist at FRAC Champagne-Ardenne.

4. L’anello e il libro – sigillo, 2017, mixed media on paper, 50x70 cm

A preparatory study for the installation in the form of a polyhedron.

The participants in the first performance and in the video (which will be presented during her solo show at ENSAPC YGREC in Paris in October 2017, and which has received the backing of FNAGP – Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques, Aide au projet 2016) are arranged in the space according to geometric forms which, on the one hand, represent Giordano Bruno’s seals and, on the other, an idea about films by Hollis Frampton:

“But instead, let us imagine every myth as a crystalline regular polyhedron, suspended, weightless, in a void, with each of its vertices touching, in perfect geodesic equilibrium, the surface of an iridescent imaginary sphere. The existence of the whole body is utterly dependent upon the integrity of all its facet represents a story.

(…) The center of the cosmos is occupied by the Polyhedron of the Story-Teller.”

Hollis Frampton, A pentagram for conjuring the narrative, “L’Écliptique du savoir, film photographie video”, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1999

5/6. L’anello e il libro – scena, 2017, brass, copper, zinc, 60 parts, variable dimensions + shell.

A design for a ritual space, that of a judicial trial: polyhedral like a narrative structure (the 6 refers to the Tarot’s Major Arcana justice card) and a film set. An irregular and organic shell is contrasted to these abstract and rationalist symbols.

7. Arcano II, 2017, tapestry, cotton, viscose, 135x218, cm

8. Arcano II,file card composition,  2017, tapestry, 160 slides, text, variable dimensions.

In 2012 the American musician John Zorn created his Mount Analogue album, inspired by the book Le mont analogue (1939-1944, left unfinished) by the writer René Daumal. By following what he called a “file card method” of composition, he created instruction cards which ranged from indications for a musical performance to free associations with the book’s content, and to quotations from it. These combinations were extracted randomly during the recording of the album to create a compositional structure that was both random and organised.

This process of randomness and organisation, organic unity and geometry, structure and linguistic play, talking pictures and visual music (synaesthesia) is at the heart of the project being presented.

With the use of Le mont analogue – file cards composition (2016) as the starting point for the work, created by utilising the Tarot of Marseilles cards, the installation superimposes Daumal’s book on another source, Georg Groddeck’s Il libro dell’ES, to transform the linguistic material into visual material. Tapestry becomes the means for weaving stories and for making film without film once again.

Meris Angioletti was born in Bergamo in 1977; she lives and works in Paris. After having studied at the Brera Academy and the Domus Academy in Milan, she gained her Master’s degree at the école des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Her recent solo shows include: Adagio (with Flora Moscovici), BF 15, Lyons; Le Grand Jeu, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne; Danza macabra, BACO, Bergamo; While we are asleep here, we are awake somewhere else, and thus everymen is two men, Moderna Museet, The Studio, Stockholm; I describe the Way and meanwhile I am Proceeding along It, Fondazione Galleria Civica di Trento; Ginnastica Oculare, GAMeC, Bergamo; Il Paradigma Indiziario, Careof, Milan.

Milano, March 2017