On view a series of site-specific installations with the themes dear to the artist: geometric figures, games of lights and colors
Most of modern art, its currents - dada, abstract expressionism, gutai, to cite some examples - have often claimed in the gesture and in all the many forms that separate the concrete uniqueness of the particular from the abstract generality of the universal one of the fundamental criteria for defining its raison d’être. Understandable. The mass society, world wars, the homologation induced by the media, radio and television first, internet then. Where can we find a space in which to reaffirm an individual, possibly radical, because it is blatantly and unequivocally individual? The risk, however, is that this focus on the particular would make the space more abstract, until it almost disappears.
THE TENSION BETWEEN CONCRETE AND ABSTRACT, MATERIAL AND IMMATERIAL, INSIDE AND OUTSIDE IS ONE OF THE FOUNDING CORES OF HIS RESEARCH
As the title of the last solo at Moca, Open, indicates (until July 6th, 2025), Olafur Eliasson is one of those artists who research on the outside, understood both in its physical and ecological exception as environment, and in its more theoretical form as geometric space, has devoted almost his entire research to it. This tension between concrete and abstract, material and immaterial, inside and outside, has perhaps always been one of the founding cores of a research that is at the same time artistic practice and ecological activism. Suffice it to mention works such as the series The glacier melt (1999-2019), in which the sequence of photographs depicting the melting of glaciers becomes both an index of the passage of time and an emotional landscape; or The weather project (2003), in which the mirror placed on the ceiling of London’s Tate Modern allowed both the apparent doubling of the exhibition space and the interaction of visitors, reflected from below in the light of a post-apocalyptic sun.
PRODUCTION WHICH AT THE SAME TIME INTENSIFIES AND MAKES MORE BLURRED DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN PERCEIVING AND PERCEIVED, INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL
What opening does Open want to witness or produce, then? The exhibition consists of a series of site-specific installations that recall motifs dear to the artist: basic geometric figures that make up true architectures, games of light and colors that modify the normal perception of space, but above all reflections, which at the same time intensify and make more blurred the distinctions between perceiving and perceived, internal and external. Because every reflection is a criticism. When we see ourselves reflected in a mirror, or when we reflect on ourselves, we open. The work thus becomes, literally or not, a reflection on the gallery and the museum, and on any concept of abstract and homogeneous space. There is no inside. There is no outside. Everything flows everywhere. Because everywhere it is open.
