Marco Cianfanelli at Gallery Momo
by Michael Smith
Up to now I've thought that Marco Cianfanelli's work was seldom more than the sum of its parts. In particular, 2002's Sasol New Signatures prize-winning work Interference, essentially a knee-jerk response to security issues and crime paranoia, felt a bit like Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa did to theorist Paul Virilio: the aestheticising of a social horror under the guise of political comment. Interference flattened a complex tangle of flatwrap razor wire into something akin to an emblem, a logo for SA's culture of fear, the sort of reductive visualisation of a complicated reality that is more forgivably the domain of music festival t-shirt printers. And 2001's untitled mosaics, part of the Hollard Street Mall Project in Johannesburg�s CBD, frankly read like bad Simon Stone knock-offs with a healthy dose of urban romanticism thrown in for good measure.
But with 2005's 'Projected Development', Cianfanelli enters a realm where restraint replaces reduction, and where a credible interest in complexity is figured in powerfully elegant terms. The show reveals a committed, prolific artist, one who strikes a balance between an understanding of his chosen materials and processes, and the importance of exploring new areas.
The show is full of elements pulling productively against one another: in the Orbit series, laser-cut steel butts up against rock, juxtaposing the immediately produced with that which has taken millennia to form; the venerable history of intaglio, an early method of producing multiple printed images, contrasts enchantingly with modern ultrasound scans, at the cutting edge of visually documenting the body; and a crest, traditionally a conveyor of all that is permanent and unwavering, is produced in plaster of Paris, the transitional medium between clay maquette and final cast.
This paradoxical pairing of materials and subject continues an impulse which arose in the Hollard Street mosaics, where Cianfanelli revelled in the jarring of pop culture images produced in the ancient medium of mosaic. Where the mosaics are the visual equivalent of one-liners, however, these new works speak volumes about the dubious need for nationalised society to cast its temporary values in permanent terms.
It is with these works in plaster of Paris that Cianfanelli has arrived at something truly singular, forging a visual language at once sparse and hugely evocative. Three of these wall sculptures, grouped under the rubric 'Formative Development', and individually titled Origin, Source and Heritage, use (as do many works on the show) topography as a metaphor for the layering of time, the phases in processes of development. The works operate at the interstice of time, culture and systems of quantification, quoting Minimalism's cool detachment but denying its claims at nothingness, strongly asserting their physicality and revealing their own construction. I saw a small section of green mould encroaching on the white expanse of one of the works, obviously a result of residual moisture trapped within the work's frame; I imagined the imminence of Donald Judd's conniption fit; I thought, what an appropriate metaphor (accidental or not), for the settler artist's conversation with his heritage: the impossibility of neat modernist solutions in a postcolonial context, the encroaching of stains onto the pristine delusion.
This idea of old representational paradigms being insufficient for a new, dislocated context also informs the use of emblems and insignia in various works on show: Cianfanelli explains that with works such as Crest... and the pair of prints entitled Nature and Nurture, he was interested in 'exploring the notion that the act of signification is an act of convenience... that symbols barely explain the things they are supposed to represent.'
Of all the empty signs he could have chosen (and if French theorist Jean Baudrillard is to be believed, there are numerous), it seems that crests and insignia, essentially the logos of nationalism, couldn't be more topical. The popular press is filled with ideas about nation-building, all clamouring for a fresh conceptualisation of self and collective that somehow, anyhow, blots out the messy past. Yet in our rush to assert a new collective identity, we seem intent on forgetting the dangers of a citizenry too quick to comply and consent. As these insignia float around Cianfanelli's works, they recall Baudrillard's play of signs, disastrously disconnected from any true or original meaning, yet keeping us transfixed. In Cianfanelli's works these signs seem to sound a cautionary note, often appearing at the epicentre of vortices that envelop surfaces. Cianfanelli seems to be warning us that the emptiness of the emblem, and its consequent digestibility, makes it, and us, vulnerable to manipulation.
Michael Smith is an artist, writer and teacher based in Johannesburg
Opens: October 6
Closes: October 31
Gallery Momo
52 7th Avenue, Parktown North, Johannesburg
Email: nikki@gallerymomo.com
www.gallerymomo.com
Tel: 011 327 3247
Hours: Mon - Sat 9am - 6pm
