TIME FUTURE looks at how the past still impacts the work of contemporary practitioners, and how memory is one of the great creative triggers. The works in the exhibition, whether they were made five hundred years ago or yesterday, all reinvoke or reinvent memories and artistic practices.
Displayed alongside the treasures of Alberto Di Castro Gallery, established in 1878 in Rome, are the works of contemporary artists, Angele Boddaert-Devletian, Pierre Bergian, Celiné Bodin, Jonathan Delafield Cook, Susan Derges, Sidival Fila, Laila Tara H, Waqas Khan, Kathrin Linkersdorff, Alice Maher, Ciprian Mureşan and Gideon Rubin.
There are direct references here between the old and the new, but the source is rarely neat and undiluted. Brilliant blue figures in Laila Tara H’s works may well be connected to her Iranian background and Persian miniatures, but also share a great deal with the bodily impact of Yves Klein Blue. The intense blue of Waqas Khan's canvases in the exhibition suggests the lapis lazuli of his native Pakistan, while the network of abstract dot like marks, vast fields of shimmering light and shade in which one senses an accumulation of knowledge, recall mathematical and geometric marks and musical notes. It is no surprise that he looked at the musical manuscripts in the Di Castro collection, and at a drawing of the Jewish calligrapher whose depiction of David is made up of different scripts and languages. Khan is like a writer. He holds an architect’s pen with two hands and incises the pummelled stone into the paper or canvas. A joy of this exhibition is that you can enjoy Khan’s and Tara H’s use of a material alongside an early 18th century adoption of the stone - a delectable shell form lapis lazuli and gilt bronze snuff box.
Ciprian Mureşan's drawings, where he has looked at the work of earlier artists, defy the classical idea of a single line of progress. Just as in the Renaissance, where the divide between experimentation and lyricism was always blurred, Mureşan offers multiple perspectives on the world at once.
Sidival Fila uses the antique in his work. He made use of the wide-ranging library of fabrics in the Antichità of Alberto Di Castro, to form the basis of the work in this show.
Susan Derges goes back to the origins of photography. She uses the night as a dark room and places photographic paper under the surface of a stream, then with the moon and a flash she passes light through the water to catch the current. There is a tenuous connection to lapis lazuli in that Professor Martin Kemp, a Leonardo specialist, has written that Derges understands the way water works as well as anyone since Leonardo da Vinci, and Leonardo had a secret recipe for his lapis lazuli paint, that was lost forever with his death.
The objects and artworks in Pierre Bergian's paintings of interiors seem ready to leap off the canvas and participate in both the old and new of Time Future. His work serves as a bridge between eras. His career could be seen as a headlong pursuit of the origins of classical architecture, with a twist or two. His paintings emerge from a deep knowledge of architectural history. He has an antiquarian’s eye that happily roams through rich spaces and artifacts.
Gideon Rubin's painting of a girl in a white tank top appears as contemporary as one can get, yet in the simple act of turning her head, he captures a fleeting moment suspended in time. The girl exists beyond past, present, and future.
The temptation in making shows that mix new art with old is to constantly look for fusions of the old and the new. This exhibition differs, with its aim to free the contemporary works from their normal arid white box and remind us of the vitality required to create the old works.
As with the historical works of art in Time Future, the exhibiting contemporary artists from around the world share an element of alchemy, taking a material or form and transforming it into another. In its simple essence, it is creativity’s sheer magic that takes us to a new place, a time future.
As TS Eliot wrote in The Four Quartets: ‘Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future.’
