l o r e n z o   l u p a n o
potato variations
19th march | 27th april 2012

prolonged until 28th May

On Monday 19th March e x t r a s p a z i o presents Potato Variations, the gallery's first solo show by Lorenzo Lupano
(b. Rome 1970).

To reach Potato Variations we go down a dark corridor where we come to a niche containing a minuscule bedroom. The narrow space and the miniature bed are occupied by a disturbing black encumbrance.

Welcome to the askew world of Lorenzo Lupano:

At the top some monkeys are floating in the pale reflection of two little turquoise ponds. Down on the floor we find the still stretched apart feet of a giant frog. It almost seems to have been lying comfortably supine and then suddenly disintegrated: the legs here and today, the rest who knows where and when. At the side, potatoes the size of water-melons sprout an acid and luminous green, and on the walls tiny landslips drag dry roots into the gallery, in the gleam of white turnips.

Armed with thimble, upholsterer's needle, pliers, drill, electric saw and video camera, Lupano folds, twists, cuts, sews and glues a great number of materials, imitating the world as it appears to him, trying to wrest, by emulation, at least some fragments of truth.

Sometimes he compares himself to a mole exploring a vast unknown territory, but in a way opposite to the slothful, nameless protagonist of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground who maintains that being too aware is an illness, an authentic, absolute illness. Lorenzo Lupano enjoys engaging in a sort of hand to hand combat with reality in order to grasp its secrets.

Part of this apparently light but in no way innocent game is the technique of boycotting any systematic nature in his exploration with calculated distractions and amnesias, in the hope of finding unexpected paths by surprise.

Lupano well knows the illustrious forerunners of this risky game. In his work he appropriates methods, adapting them to his needs, such as that of J. S. Bach who amused himself by breaking up the perfect symmetrical-modular structure of the Goldberg Variations (hence the exhibition title) with the popular ditty Cabbage and red turnips have diverted me from you.

To reduce the preciosity risk (but maybe also to emphasise it) of a series of little drawings and annotations torn from his diaries, he obliges us to bend to see them close up, since he has mounted them low down on the wall, at the mercy of the damp cloth used for cleaning the floor. Who knows whether some elements might not be erased or added, thus altering course at random or by surprise.

We encounter accords between art and reality in the way it appears to us in the too small and too large, too slow and too fast of Lupano's current cataloguing, deliberately left provisional and with apparent carelessness about time.

And while on a wall the peak of the artist's red cap, long as the hand on a tower clock, turns slowly without telling time, two sculptures called Myopes (boxes with funnel eyes, like film-cameras drawn by a child) stare perplexedly into the void in search of a meaning and, projected in a corner, Lupano's coat in miniature stirs firmly on the spot.

Guido Schlinkert


The Plague Year

He went out into the street. His coat, like the tramp's, was all covered with soil. They looked at him as if he came from the other world. Whereas he'd just come up from underground

Since the potato (Solanum tuberosum) is grown as a foodstuff, it is absolutely necessary to eat it with the skin. So as not to lose its nutritional value.
All the same, we do well to mistrust the surface.
For example the white turnip (Brassica campestris) has a very thin skin, not edible. Unlike its root - rich in water, glucides, mineral salts and vitamins - the skin that covers it has no nutritional value.

In any case, naked or dressed, turnips or potatoes are eaten on the chalk-peaked mountains and sugar paper rocks where men, friends of the hare (Lepus), head towards "the place where eyes watch" and with a casual air eat brovada and shepherd's pie around a cardboard fire, without ever taking their eyes off the wine.

Many years passed in this way. Until man with his snowshoes crossed the passes of marvel, seeking a way to get underground.

On the other hand, if the Middle Ages hadn't got rid of Aristotle, who mistrusted magic and mysticism, our civilisation wouldn't have had Bestiaries, wouldn't have had the winged elephant, the unicorn, the yenna, the bonatio, the lynx, the lanmia, the manticore, the pontecha, the gryphon, the tawny pipit, the mermaids, the sprightly one, the big butterfly, the poisonous snakes, the asp, the lupica and, precisely, Lupano, his cloth zoo, his fisher monkeys and certain of his travellers in parkas with big hoods, very dark-faced, just like those 16th century Spanish pioneers who, from Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Mexico, imported the potato for us, but maybe not the turnip or the radish which I believe came from Japan.

At this point a slap on the back for everyone in the mole's hole making merry. Where however we have to stay for a good while due to the epidemic.
It was the plague year. Stretched out on the sofa, tête-à-tête with the potato, we paused to leaf through Herbariums and listen to stories of a different tone: the Wide Apart Frog, the Rotating Cap and other stories you don't know such as the Stick Insect (Phasmatodea), Tito Primate and the ones about so many different animals, on paper, in full relief or in semi-functional form. And yet another monkey, in rubber gloves, impatiently tapping its slipper while washing the dishes.

Bruno Stefanelli