Nothing Is Universal, Not Even Air is the first exhibition of silkscreen paintings of selected images from DESASTRES.
DESASTRES is an on-going performance of Experimental/Noise/Metal guitar through mass amplification that synchronizes image. First performed in the Australia Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022 for 200 consecutive days – each day of the Biennale’s duration. The large-scale, performance as installation featured Marco Fusinato improvising slabs of noise, saturated feedback, and discordant intensities with an electric guitar, that triggered a deluge of disparate and disconnected images onto a freestanding floor-to-ceiling LED wall. The mass index of colliding images is a mess.
This collision of image is the catalyst for the series of silkscreen paintings. These works exist in parallel to the performances.
The images selected for the silkscreen paintings were chosen by instinct, from an extensive archive that is sourced via an open search across multiple online platforms, or Fusinato’s own photographs taken with his phone-camera.
The title for the exhibition is a quote by the artist given in an interview in 2022*. By extension, the titles for each painting in the exhibition are the jpg tags of the original image files with the word ‘variation’ added. All the works are white on black, this reversing of positive/negative references earlier works by the artist. The silkscreen process is alchemical, physical, open to mistakes, irregularities, and variations. This experimental approach is analogous to the DESASTRES performance where sound is improvised, and the images randomised, generating an unknown outcome. Within the exhibition, monochromatic black on black paintings make a connection back to the performance whereby a cut to silence cuts the screen to black.
This new series translates jpgs from the immediate and ephemeral context of the performance, through the labour of silkscreen printing, into the lineage of painting and broader history of materials and processes of mark making. The outcome transitions from a fleeting image to an object of prolonged meditation.
Installation images: DESASTRES 288631D3-2D44-4EBF-AF461AA1FF176766_source copy.jpg variation
2024
Liquitex titanium white heavy body acrylic with gloss and screen-print medium on Belle Arti 96U Fine 360gsm black double primed linen
150 x 240 cm