Practicalities @ Baert Gallery
PRACTICALITIES / LA VITA MATERIALE / LA VIE MATERIELLE Curated by Marina Dacci
November 5 – December 17, 2022
"Je me souviens de la sorte d'émotion qui s'est produite dans mon corps d’enfant : celle d’accéder à une connaissance encore interdite pour moi. Le monde était immense et d'une complexité très claire. Là, il faudrait inventer un vocable qui dirait que, très clairement, on sait ne pas comprendre ce qu’il y a à comprendre". (Marguerite Duras, La Vie Matèrielle, pp. 30-31, Gallimard 2021)
“I can remember what my childish body felt: as if some knowledge had been vouchsafed to it that was still forbidden. The world was huge and complex yet very clear. One would have to invent a word for it—for the way I managed to act as if I didn’t understand what was there to be understood.” (Marguerite Duras, Practicalities, pp. 21-22, Grove Weidenfeld 1990)
Baert Gallery is pleased to present Practicalities, a group exhibition curated by Marina Dacci. The show takes its title from the journal of Marguerite Duras, originally titled La Vie Matérielle and translated into English as Practicalities, which was first published in 1987. The exhibition is the result of a lengthy process of sharing and exchange of ideas by a grouping of women artists. The Los Angeles version will be the third iteration of the exhibition whose prior versions took place at the CENTRALE Center for Contemporary Art in Brussels Belgium (as La Vie Matérielle), and the Palazzo Magnani in Italy (as La vita Materiale). Works and venues have changed, but the spirit animating the project has remained the same. In this American iteration, German-born, L.A.-based Sophie Wahiquist has joined the group of Italian artists who all share a similar sensitivity.
In one of the galleries, a “dining room” has been set up which emphasizes the value of sharing. It can be considered a tribute, or else an echo, to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. This is an intimate space in which the large table and a reading corner are elements pregnant with potential for the exchange between the artists and the psychic energies of appreciation for their work—a comfort zone where the visitor can feel welcomed.
The exhibition is an invitation to look at everyday life through different eyeglasses, accepting its complexity and mystery, using the imagination and the ability to transform matter, to open the body and the mind, to know how to share.
For all the artists, art and life—in all their complexity and fertility—are closely knit together, both in the poetics of their research and in the choice of their materials. The works speak of the ability to give life to inner landscapes where the sense of belonging to the world fluctuates, of the ability to destroy the obvious, and to bring new, desirable, and desired visions to light. They speak of ancient memories and future possibilities, of humanity’s migratory paths through matter, objects, nature, and the relationship with others: a continuous process of influence and exchange that comes to life by mutually shaping us. Some reflect on human phylogeny and the nature/culture relationship in its multiple features; others on the possibility of
merging the inner dimension and the outer environment by creating real interior landscapes meant as spaces of life and imagination; yet others are transforming literary sources into visual narratives. They employ different techniques, with different emotional punctuation made of silences, of slow rhythms sewn into daily lives, of uncertainties and fears, but also of strength and conflict in search for the freshness of “tomorrow”. They are always in precarious balance, like our lives themselves.
We are also matter, like the objects surrounding us: both are the repositories of memory. The body, the central element of the project, denies the fracture between the physical matter and the psyche, which seems today increasingly insidious. The body is not a coat. At first, we get to know the world through the synesthetic relationship the senses offer us, which then reaches the mind to be transformed into consciousness—a path that is possible only by reassembling the complex unity we represent, made as we are of material substance and inner motions.
For the artist, the relationship of the hand with the matter arises from an urgency, sometimes unconscious, but always thaumaturgic. The created work is released to continue moving energy between the “inner self” and the surrounding environment—of which we are an integral and indissoluble part—giving new perspectives on the mystery of existence. The work is a trigger. Memory is a central element feeding on selective stratifications by striking a dialogue with the entropy of matter during the work process.
Practicalities, like Duras’s work, is an intimate journal yearning to be shared, a way to experience intimacy and belonging while leading us towards a collective experiential dimension. Intimacy refers to the way the artist “sees the world” and the way this gaze is conveyed into the work, in the way it is being offered and shared with others. It is not only the visible that is essential in a work but also the connection being created between the artist and the visitor when the works are displayed and looked at.
- Marina Dacci