Danny Avidan
text by Domenico De Chirico
Tube Culture Hall is pleased to announce the first Italian solo exhibition of the artist Danny Avidan, born in Jamaica in 1989, Italian by adoption, accompanied by a critical text by Domenico de Chirico and in collaboration with Andrea Festa Fine Art from Rome.
From the critical text by Domenico De Chirico:
"I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought... “— Henry Miller, "Tropic of Cancer" (first published in 1934 by Obelisk Press in Paris)
This exhibition starts with the nose. A highly perceptive and philosophical nose to be understood as the supreme sense of intuitive knowledge. A Nietzschean nose, celebrated with the statement "my genius is in my nose", that becomes a formidable ally of truth, able to probe souls and hearts, seeking and smelling, discovering and finding, exciting and frightening, howling and dozing between organic remains both fervent and fetid, since every cell, every atom, whispers life and therefore death, life and its dreams, hopes, beginnings and desires, loves and scourges, rivers and sands, humid and arid, the world. The canvases unfold from such an inductive approach, a path that goes from the smallest cell of being to rarefied mythological constructions, which is nothing but a return to the starting point, a cycle of life, whispers and cries, atavistic artifacts speaking the language of blood, playing with the most hidden and original emotions.
A processual dualism, therefore, visceral and intellectual, impulsive and historiographical, a coming and going that nevertheless starts from the organic rubble and then returns to it incessantly. Danny Avidan's works are sedimented and torn layers in which every element wallows among all the others to praise their transformation and birth, destruction and the fatuous.
As already revealed by the title, Galatea is the matrix of the entire exhibition: a figure from Greek mythology, one of the fifty sea nymphs, the so-called Nereids, she had a love affair with the young and handsome Aci, son of Faun and the nymph Simethys, unbeknownst to the Cyclops Polyphemus. When the latter found out, he went on a rampage and crushed Aci under a boulder. Galatea, in her pain, mixed her tears with the blood of a pale and dying Aci and turned it into a river.
The artist is triad, milk, blood and eye, beyond gender and roles, he pushes this vital flow to the phalanges and in doing so implements a material metamorphosis that finds concreteness in a dense and scratched pictorial stroke. Observing the result not too closely, it seems like you are looking at a fetus, in constant stillness although perpetually in motion, dormant and yet in a total evolutionary phase. There is something holding everything together, as if the entities want to remain stick together at all costs: even when life course ends, it does not disappear but becomes something else, it mixes with something else, it remains glued to life as if it knew no other alternative way of being itself.
And this is how Avidan's canvases remain glued to the world like gasps of organic paint, ready to be licked, with the color of flesh, the tones of reproduction and the murmurs of what has happened and of what continually and repeatedly happens here and outside of here.