Press release A matter of life - Ciocca Arte Contemporanea, Milano 2003

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LUISA RABBIA

Ciocca Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present A matter of life , the second Solo Show in the Gallery by Luisa Rabbia.
The title of the show is taken from the video, in which an ordinary old man is having a meal. While he is eating, few things come out from his mouth. "Many times one needs to vomit one's heart out in life" - the artist says, to vomit gives the sensation of re-starting from zero. Through the digestion of our passed experiences, the present re-births and the whole becomes part of an unique cycle of life.
The video and the drawing Tears and Blood (2002) which were shown at her first Solo Show in New York at Massimo Audiello Gallery in 2002, have now been extended into a ceramic floor piece with watercolor's effects.
The relief drawing seems to corrode the ceramic, as time passes by slowly and cancels imprints of somebody who was present.
Tears and blood (2003) is a perfect fusion between drawing and sculpture; water, tears and blood are vital liquids but also symbols of ancestral emotional situations. Here the shower is a stage for a world seen from the sky, where things are passing by quickly on their way to disappear into a black hole.
In Rabbia's works there is a continuous tension and research about the relation between Time and Thought: the drawing is a tool used to tell how time passes by and the tiny figures that appear slowly on the paper reveal emotional situations within the process of transformation, loosing and melting themselves into blue Klein constellations.
Some new drawings will be presented in which the artist describes vulnerable moods through a research close to the Automatism and to the work of the Belgian writer and artist Henri Michaux who in his writings reflects psychological states in the deepness and intimacy of a nightly sky.
In this Solo-Show, drawings on paper, video and ceramic works, present once again an artist who is using different materials, tightening the borders between reality and imagination, unconsciousness and the experienced.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a text of Barry Schwabsky, who regularly writes for publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Tema Celeste, and the London Review of Books. He is the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press, 2003) and he collaborated with Luisa Rabbia on the recently published limited edition book Drafts of Water.

The music of the video A matter of life is by Fa Ventilato, New York 2003

"(As with Doubt or Desire)" by Barry Schwabsky

Tears and Blood- does the title of Luisa Rabbia's new work in ceramic suggest a tone of Churchillian exhortation, like the famous statesman's call for his countryman to give their blood, sweat, toil, and tears to the struggle against fascism? I dont think so. Rabbia's work speaks more in the present than the future tense, less in the imperative mood than the subjunctive - as my dictionary puts it, representing "a denoted act or state not as fact but as contingent or possible or viewed emotionally (as with doubt or desire)". Or as Rabbia herself once wrote, "I oscillate between the past, the present, and the imagination". In the tradition of the Symbolists and the Surrealists, Rabbia teaches us to value our nightly return to the republic of dreams as an opportunity for encounters of a different quality from the ones that occur in ordinary consciousness - encounters with the "I"who is another, or with the others who are also "I".

Rabbia has used the title Tears and Blood before (for a video work in 2002), so we can assume the words carry special significance for her. It is, as the title of this exhibition would have it, A matter of life; we see the same substances at work in the video of the same name. The human body, as we all know, is primarily composed of water; blood and tears are among the reminders of the fluid essence of what Prince Hamlet once called " this all too solid flesh"- reminders of its insistent tendency to melt. Blood we have no conscious control over and tears, precious little. They are substances at whose appearance will and reason must recognize their limits. In Rabbia's new floor-based ceramic relief, a grid of white square tiles - one might speak of a synthesis between the sculpture of Carl Andre and the mundane environment of an institutional shower room - becomes the scene or stage for the play of phantasmal images that seem to have emerged from the very rivulets of water that, disturbed by the imprint of a pair of feet, are flowing toward the drain to disappear into some other dimension: a woman sheds, with great effort, a lizard-like skin; other figures seem to be engulfed in the torrent; one, in a vaguely heart-shaped splotch of blood red, seems rather to be burying her head in the life-giving liquid the way a sleeper trying not to wake up might bury her head in a pillow. All are somehow or other in the grip of a flux that cannot be controlled and barely even resisted.

This work evokes pain, but also a rapture such as Bernini's St. Theresa might have recognized - "and this can only appear as reality by virtue of the implied visionary state of mind of the beholder", as Rudolf Wittkower put it. Not much contemporary art is so nakedly emotional, or asks its viewers to recall so directly the formative and transformative power of their own doubts and desires. Rabbia does not ask us to see her work through eyes misted with tears; the tears are already out there in things. We imagine our blood, our tears, and finally ourselves being drawn into the whirlpool with a strange serenity and it is for this gift of equanimity that one is so grateful to the wise art of Luisa Rabbia.