Depotenziare

C+N Gallery CANEPANERI gallery is pleased to announce Depotenziare, the second solo exhibition in Italy by the British artist Roger Hiorns (b. Birmingham, 1975, lives and works in London). Comprising paintings, objects and a film, the works in the show employ an apparently simple set of material and conceptual processes — anointment, containment, concealment, reversal — to explore how power acts on and through bodies, technologies, and systems of belief, and how it might be neutralized.

In Hiorns’ new paintings, abstracted, vaguely insectoid human forms engage in instinctive acts of what might be sex, or a new and ambiguous form of movement. With its blotchy washes of soiled turquoise and bruised pink pigment, the environment they inhabit — a landscape, a skyscape? — feels dreamy, almost fantastical, a place where customary logics do not quite obtain. Here and there, the surfaces of Hiorns’ canvases are corrupted by fleshy polyps of latex, or else obliterated by crystalline blooms of blue copper sulphate, a substance suggestive of authorless, inorganic and all-consuming growth. The artist refers to these works as ‘trans’ paintings, calling to mind the Latin prefix meaning variously ‘across’, ‘beyond’, ‘through’, and ‘so as to change’. Notably, their colours echo those of the transgender solidarity flag.

A pair of found white polystyrene packing containers lie open on the gallery floor like cattle troughs, or perhaps empty sarcophaguses. The artist has treated their interiors with a wash of liquified bovine brain matter. Now dried into a stable skin of structural protein, this material is a residue of unknown — and indeed, unknowable — cognitive activity.

In a found photographic image reversed onto canvas and spattered with blue copper sulphate crystals, we see two fundamentalist Christian protestors brandishing placards outside an abortion clinic. The backwards text reads ‘PRAYER IS NOT A THOUGHT CRIME’ — an unwittingly ironic statement assuming the pair believe that their acts of supplication will be noted and honoured by a supernatural power.

Hiorns’ new black and white film revisits his major project, A Retrospective View of the Pathway (2016), for which he buried a military aircraft in a field in Eastern England. Footage of the plane’s interment has been reversed according to the Sabatier effect, so that dark tones appear light, and light tones dark — an echo of the reversal enacted by the artist, when he removed this deadly piece of machinery from the sky and placed it in the earth. The film’s soundtrack features both field recordings of the burial, and the rumblings of a human digestive system. The suggestion is that the aircraft is being processed — even perhaps assimilated — by an unseen body. What strange nutrients, we wonder, might it give up?

(Tom Morton)