Sunt lacrimae rerum [They are the tears of things] presents a series of works from Collezione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The show focuses on contemporary sculpture both as a medium and as a tool to explore the world of objects, and our individual relationship with things. The quote from Virgil’s Aeneis, after which the exhibition is titled, emphasizes the melancholy that often accompanies this relationship – the sense of yearning and loss that comes from associating objects with past memories. At the same time, the expression “the tears of things” may suggest the idea of an emotional life of objects, a disturbing vitality inside inanimate things, as if they did not content themselves with being looked at, but could look back at us. The show gathers works by seven artists who, although with different strategies and objectives, have developed a set of images that convey feelings of ambiguity, desire and restlessness towards the world of objects.
Martin Boyce creates melancholic visual poems, borrowing his imagery from the icons of design history and modernist architecture, revisited in our present perspective. We find more objects with a past in the photographs of Becky Beasley, which contain subtle reflections on time and identity.
Through his video language, Alex Hubbard stages the artistic gesture, short-circuiting time signals, actions, and visions – or performing act, representation and reality, a relationship that is always problematic and uncertain. Something similar happens with the photographs of James Casebere, which are real documents of clever fake worlds, scenic reproductions of architectural archetypes that expose the fabricated nature of reality.
The relationship between objects, body and space is central in the works of Markus Schinwald, who creates seductive images and surreal situations that evoke the theme of fetish, a sexual desire that focuses on parts of the body and inanimate objects. Trisha Donnelly’s works are veiled in mystery, poised between representation and abstraction, visibility and invisibility, physicality and metaphysics. Finally, irrational forces and pagan rites inhabit the works of Klaus Weber, who evokes primordial beliefs such as shamanism and animism, undermining the shared principles of science and culture, on which our society is based.