OIL VOID

Contemporary Cluster is pleased to announce OIL VOID, the first solo show by Jonathan Vivacqua (Erba, 1986) at the gallery. The exhibition, opening on Thursday, November 7, marks the artist’s return to the city of Rome with a body of site-specific works in dialogue with the architecture of the new venue.

OIL VOID combines two terms that, when juxtaposed, form a fictional counterpart, referencing two aspects deeply connected to Jonathan Vivacqua’s research. The resonance between these two nouns creates a synesthetic and ambiguous bond, where a viscous substance – engine oil, which plays a significant role in some of the new works on display, or, more broadly, material as both medium and ultimate purpose of sculpture – permeates the empty space. This allows for a non-contextual relationship between organic perception, plasticity within interstitial spaces, and the voids that compose the environment-space.

Vivacqua’s research, always interested in establishing a dialectical yet organic continuity with space, draws from the traditions of Minimalism and Conceptual art, translating some of their core components: module, repetition, formal geometry, and reduction. Through these lexical matrices, Vivacqua transposes and updates a legacy to transcend it. Implicitly, there’s a stance against modernist formalism and its detached approach, highlighting the vital potential of each installation, conceived as an intervention aimed at remodulating the relationship with the surrounding environment.

STILLNESS, TURMOIL, SOUNDLESS are some of the evocative titles Vivacqua has chosen for this new series of works: from pieces created with poured cement mixed with pigments, to sculptures assembled from modular polystyrene panels coated with transparent resin; from experiments with engine oil, dissolved polystyrene, and transparent resin, to the monumentality of overlapping steel profiles. What emerges is a seductive fusion of painting and sculpture, using experimental techniques aimed at creating a new sculptural syntax.

The selected materials in this exhibition take on a fundamental role; they are assembled through simple geometric shapes, often recreating minimal self-supporting structures whose surface is left intact, revealing the material’s essential qualities. Void, weight, gravity, the plastic continuity of the structures, and the new temporality gained by the installation are the transformative elements Vivacqua chooses to engage with, opening a new horizon of meaning.

The construction of space thus becomes existenzminimum, an action capable of supplanting what came before, rooted in the vision of creating, through primary structures, an expanded field (R. Krauss). Sculpture and installation, conceived as accessible environments or anti-monuments, redefine the space, dictating a new compositional rhythm that appropriates the architecture. In this sense, Vivacqua’s approach is constructive: starting from reduction, a new function is gained.