OLIVO BARBERI – ADRIATIC SEA (STAGED) DANCING PEOPLE
2016-02-22In August 2015, while creating LA CITTA PERFETTA (The Perfect City), a new film commissioned by MAXXI, Rome, and exhibited concurrently with the artist’s mid-career retrospective Immagini 1978-2014, Barbieri once again chose a helicopter as his main platform from which to shoot. While traversing 400 kilometers along the coast from Vasto to Ravenna, Barbieri discovered groups of people standing in shallow water in distinct and unlikely arrangements, performing what appeared to be a joyful ritualistic dance led by instructors.
The historic Adriatic coastline presents a continuous stretch of industrial, commercial, residential, and recreational activity. A mix of affluent urban living, tourism, congestion and environmental waste, Barbieri sees the area as a “perfect” example of the complexity and paradox of contemporary urbanization. He describes the dancing figures on the beach as “a manifestation of the genius loci of those places where folk dance is extremely popular and historically regarded by the old and new generations and where still the big disco clubs stand like cathedrals in the desert.”
Barbieri envisioned the shoreline and sea as a film or stage set where people on vacation dance to imaginary choreography, isolated against a digitally created blue heightened by the artist to suggest the blue of one’s imagination when remembering a day at the beach. The resulting photographs evoke both the ritualistic joyfulness of Matisse’s figures in the painting La Danse and stills from a Technicolor Busby Berkeley film. In addition, Barbieri has created ghost like twins of the photographs where the same dancing figures are reduced to simple white silhouettes, like in an architectural rendering, becoming simultaneously more comprehensible yet more enigmatic.
Opposite – Adriatic Sea (Staged) Dancing People 8, 2015
Exhibition runs through till March 19th, 2016
Yancey Richardson Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York
NY 10011
