IT WAS ALWAYS ABOUT FOREVER is about the ongoing discourse on the banal universe of static things, of how immortality itself, when turned into the subject of art, becomes framed as something banal. Departing from a generation of exhibitions fascinated with the quick and the dead, IT WAS ALWAYS ABOUT FOREVER grapples with the ongoing struggle against this certain cosmological indifference.
In this two-man exhibition, Wawi Navarroza and Costantino Zicarelli take this on by challenging the traditional concept of "still life" by actualizing "a still life" by precisely muting their subjects. As Wawi conceals inanimate present objects in the principle that "invisibility is a form of mortality", she likewise brings to life an inventory of lost images. Costantino, on the other hand, rekindles the blurred and antonymous relationship between the still and the moving, the actual and its illusion by portraying subjects from the former’s region. In doing so, they are delivered from the object that forms their prison.
In this exhibition, Costantino and Wawi kill by removing their subjects from their particular purpose in the world but, through the act of selecting them as subjects to this series, keeps them alive.
Essay: Still Life is Dead
Caesura is the point where Wawi Navarroza and Costantino Zicarelli stand presently, the very place, according to Marcel Proust in Reche du temps perdu, that “leads us from one name to another name”. They stand on the train sub-stations of 'painter' and 'photographer', watching out for the crisscrossing routes of transfer. Embarking on the rail en route to drawing and sculpture, Costantino calculates the distance between model and copy in all of the rorschachs of Beyond Evil's warped allure as well as the illusive charcoal-resin One Billion Years. Wawi waits for the next train to a clinical, authorless platform of a new documentation of “what is omitted, obscured, what is outside the frame” while she has one foot on staged mise-en-scènes such as In the Company of Others.
It Was Always About Forever departs from their curious experiments on their individual artistic processes, and in turn becomes the product of this organic discourse on the value of their respective media in the technical, purist sense – photography and painting – and how they discover that both forms have a wanton appropriation with each other. Costantino works in photographic reproduction and by no means does he alter the arrangement of particular imagery, somewhat echoing Douglas Huebler's “The world is full of objects. I do not wish to add any more.” As one-dimensional bricolages in their reference, his drawings are painterly in the manner of the subjects’ relationship with their foreground – sometimes independently floating as with Untitled (broken chandelier) and in other instances, neutralizing together. On the other hand, painting is implicit in Wawi's production as she arranges the compositions of her works, whether or not they are staged, without concealing what conceals objects in Plus Minus, or “found” in The Heavy Breathers and Held up to the light, front & center. Furthermore she makes use of grids, a common method of painters, in conventional ways as with the two former works and irregular as with Perhaps it was possibly because, #33 and #21.
This dialogue where photography and painting is examined in contrast and in unison, works by Wawi and Costantino seem to add on to Christian Boltanski's discourse of film and music versus the visual arts of painting and photography in his remark that “there isn't a progression at a static image.” As this statement sprung from Boltanski's mastery in creating a suspense in the journey in time through theatrical installation as with his 1990s works installed in altar-like and sepulchral settings, It Was Always About Forever takes this matter of staging into the very production of Wawi and Costantino's works. And the crescendo of which Boltanski patronizes in cathartic film and music is arrested by taking a variety of objects and non-events together that are, without any form of commentary other their juxtaposition, indestructible. This series is essentially grounded on the reflexivity of the topical inexhaustibility of the banal universe of static things. Ironically enough, the progression will not lie on the object captured at that present time but through the impulse of its own destruction that what seems eternal contains.
On the same equation of the overlooked commonplace having an eternal faculty, the casual remark “It was always about forever!” traces a generation of discourse fascinated on the quick and the dead. The expel of resignation characteristic of this remark follows how immortality itself, when turned into the subject of art, becomes framed as something banal. Likewise the irony is heightened in the exhibition's monochromatic climate, suggesting that the color of the subjects is irrelevant, the essence of the works being in black and white.
Wawi and Costantino take on the task of contributing to the irony of death-as-stock-in-trade by reconsidering the traditional concept of 'still life' by actualizing 'a still life' by precisely muting their subjects. If Boltanski conceals his photographs in Les Concessions with a black cloth, Wawi already conceals inanimate present objects before they are shot. Her other series brings to life an inventory of lost images (slides that are anonymous until found), in a principle that befits the remark made by Gino De Dominicis in the Italian television program “Angel”: “Invisibility is a form of immortality.” Costantino, on the other hand, rekindles the blurred and antonymous relationship between the still and the moving by portraying subjects from the former’s region. In doing so, they are delivered from the object that forms their prison.
by Siddharta Perez
