Autunno alla Serpentine

Mentre sta per chiudersi il Pavilion estivo la Serpentine inaugura due nuove mostre una declinata nella inquietudine dell'artista norvegese Torbjørn Rødland mentre negli spazi più storici c'è l'opera di Wade Guyton, sicuramente più estetica. 

Torbjørn Rødland (born 1970, Stavanger, Norway) is a Los Angeles-based photographer who creates portraits, still lifes and landscapes, which simultaneously inhabit, defamiliarise and disrupt the realm of the everyday.

Depicting situations that can appear overly familiar, Rødland’s photographs reveal an underlying lyricism and poetic language that result from the artist’s reconfiguration of the diverse material and media that surround us.

At first glance, Rødland’s work often inhabits the aesthetic space of commercial photography due to a formal clarity and, at times, fetishistic approach to subjects, objects and materials. Recurring tropes within his images include produce such as oranges, bananas, cakes and octopus tentacles, and close-ups of body parts and related accessories. Knees, feet and torsos partner with pads, socks and tattoos, while viscous substances, such as honey and paint, coat, ooze and drip over his subjects. 

Rødland’s approach to image-making – using analogue photography in mostly staged scenarios – draws attention to the constructed nature of the image, while leaving open the potential for unexpected outcomes. That his images hold the viewer’s gaze is not only the result of a certain pleasure in the act of looking, but also the indirect, uncertain nature of their messages. As the artist states, his photographs aim to ‘keep you in the process of looking’. 

The Touch That Made You at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery – Rødland’s first exhibition in the UK – brings together a diverse selection of works from the past two decades, which demonstrate the breadth of subjects captured and scenarios created by the artist. It also includes Rødland’s film, 132 BPM (2005), animating subjects with the continuous, metronomic beats of dance music. The exhibition title refers to the physical and immaterial aspects of his images, from the rays of light and liquid touches that gradually reveal an image in the darkroom to the framing and staging enacted through the lens.

American artist Wade Guyton uses digital technologies – iPhones, cameras, computers and consumer-grade Epson printers – as tools to create both large-scale paintings on linen and smaller compositions on paper.

Guyton is interested in the translations that take place between these tools, transforming three-dimensional space into digital information that is subsequently reproduced on surfaces and in space.

This new exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, entitled Das New Yorker Atelier, Abridged, presents a body of work completed in the past two years. Guyton’s choice of title bears witness to the site of both the first installation of the work, in Germany, and its place of production in downtown Manhattan. It also references Guyton’s encounter with the painting Das Pariser Atelier (1807) by the Swiss artist Hans Jakob Oeri. The studio’s potential, not just as a locus for discussion and production, but as a material in and of itself, is echoed throughout this exhibition.

Guyton’s paintings are printed on to sheets of linen that are folded in half and run, sometimes repeatedly, through large inkjet printers. Inconsistencies surface on the canvas, caused by diminishing levels of ink toner or technical glitches, distorting and disrupting the image, while intentional ‘errors’, such as streaks, creases and misalignments, occur as the fabric feeds – or is pulled – through the machine. Guyton’s works on paper are printed over pages removed from art catalogues, with the artist’s additions obscuring or revealing the original images and text. 

Das New Yorker Atelier, Abridged has evolved from an exhibition first shown at Munich’s Museum Brandhorst earlier this year. The works focus on three different kinds of image production: photographs taken of the artist’s studio on his camera phone, screenshots of web pages captured on the artist’s computer, and details of bitmap files. Together these track Guyton’s working environment, affirming the ‘potential to use anything as subject matter’. The Serpentine’s relationship to Guyton stretches back to the 2006 group exhibition, Uncertain States of America, when he exhibited with Kelley Walker.