Francesco Jodice | GIOCATTOLI
Francesco Jodice
GIOCATTOLI
Opening: Saturday, 11 May, 2024, from 11 am to 9 pm
Duration: until 26 July, 2024
Exhibition space: Casa Di Marino – Via Monte di Dio, 9, 80132 – Napoli
Opening hours: Monday – Friday 10.30 am – 1.30 pm / 3.00 – 7.00 pm
Take a look at the toys around you
Right before your eyes
The toys are real
(Black Sabbath)
Francesco Jodice
GIOCATTOLI (TOYS)
What is Reality made of, and what are the phenomena that populate it?
Have we forsaken a slow observation of things and reality in favor of a moderate and superficial reading to mantain happiness?
Are we today embracing the happiness of the famous “last man” a creature as indestructible as the flea, living longer than any, dwelling in an eternal present, neglecting to rebuild values, and censoring death and illness?
Are we facing an eclipse of critical judgement, of study and insight?
Whether it is ‘the man in the street’ or ‘the expert’ speaking, there seems to be a prevailing tendency to easily surrender to a simplistic conception of life and the world, erasing qualitative differences and succumbing to the tyranny of opinions and perspectives. Easy to produce, easy to retract.
This epoch in which we are active participants, this fracture wherein we redefine and reconstruct our modern structures, is replete with complexities and narratives that we have forsaken by embracing a saccharine texture of reality.
We have ceased to dismantle and reassemble the layers of a reality now appearing univocal to us, populated by fetish objects arranged on a shelf.
The toys are before our eyes, and they are real.
With this exhibition Francesco Jodice deliberately sets adrift his personal confrontation with the major geopolitical tectonics, abandoning his research approach aimed at the construction of grand narrative arcs.
After West and City Tellers, which lasted eight years, and What We Want fifteen, a ‘pictorial’ moment begins for Jodice, working on semiotically autonomous works, which begin and end without engaging in a narrative frame. They are self-sustaining objects.
The exhibited works, some recent, some entirely new, some repurposed from pre-existing projects, fall within this narrative. The exhibition-narrative, with its deliberately and dangerously puerile title (TOYS) stems from the conviction that the West has planned and premeditated the lowering of our attention threshold… not of others, of the ‘enemy’, of our own. Over the past 10-15 years, we have been induced to gradually skim over the desire for a complex understanding of the texture of reality. Exasperated, we have declared “enough” abandoning that instinct for exploration. It was a deliberate project; there was nothing random about it. This project does not concern art in the first instance, but concerns culture in the highest sense – popular culture, culture popular culture, everyone’s culture – and has also stratigraphically involved what used to be called the intelligenties. The point is that we have gradually accepted and metabolised this process abandoning ourselves to it. Hence the Black Sabbath quote – which becomes the exhibition’s manifesto – and the title: there is nothing more dangerous than a blunt object deliberately misunderstood as a toy.
The works presented are, like much of Jodice’s recent production, ‘physically beautiful’ objects that anyone can ambiguously acquire, collect or enjoy. This happens, either because they are very beautiful, or because one is still able to understand that they are very dangerous, sharp objects, rituals. Toys, then, but dangerous; dangerous only for those who are still so palsied and boring as to feel a deep love for the stratigraphic reading of the environment and things around us. Otherwise, they are just objects. And so, despite the fact that we live in the first real age of fear since the end of the cold war, we are all serene, because we have accepted and shared, this neo-imposition of a simplified reality. Everything is
social, everything is all wrapped up, all on the surface. And this is also the reason for the lack of a real press release – it’s all there.
‘As Black Sabbath’s “Computer God” goes <<[…] the objects are all around you… what more do you want? And they’re real! >>. Then whether they are toys or more complex vision machines, that’s up to you. There is no one left to help you, there is no state to investigate you, there is no complex reality that comes knocking at your door, it’s all up to you.’
Francesco Jodice
Francesco Jodice lives and works in Milan. He currently teaches at the Biennial Course in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies and the Master in Photography and Visual Design at NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan.
After graduating in architecture in 1995, he devoted himself to his first artistic research using the media of photography and video. In 1999 he took part in the establishment of the Multiplicity collective. Between 1996 and 2004, the relationship between large urban landscapes and communities was at the center of his research, as evidenced by the projects What We Want, The Secret Traces and The Morocco Affair. Afterwards, Jodice’s attention turned to the different anthropological cultures in relation to the new phenomena of megapolitism. Hikikomori, Ritratti di classe and the Citytellers film trilogy belong to this period. Since 2008, geopolitics has been at the center of the artist’s research. The analysis of the Western system crisis has led to the creation of movies, installations and photographic projects such as Atlante, American Recordings, Rivoluzioni and the more recent West. Jodice considers the practice of art as a civil poetics, his artistic processes promote forms and models of public participation. Examples of this activity can be found in the projects La notte del drive-in. Milano spara, Babel and Scenario. His main projects include the photographic atlas What We Want – an observatory on landscape changes as a projection of people desires – the archive of urban tailings, The Secret Traces and the trilogy of films on new forms of urbanism: Citytellers. His most recent works – Atlante, American Recordings, Rivoluzioni and West – explore possible future scenarios of the West. In 2022, with the support of the Italian Council, he concludes the West project, a ten-year research on the imagery that American history has generated and spread throughout the world and the reasons for the collapse of this empire through the investigation of
its symbolism.
He has participated in international group exhibitions such as: documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002 invited by Okwui Enwezor with the Multiplicity collective, the Liverpool Biennial in 2004, as well as the Venice Biennale in 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2010. In 2006 he exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial entitled How to live togther, and at the ICP Triennial in New York, while in 2021 he was invited to the Yinchuan Biennial by Marco Scotini.
He exhibited at the Pecci Museum in Prato in 2001, at the Milan Triennale in 2003, at the GAM in Turin in 2005, at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris, FR) in 2006, at the Tate Modern in London in 2007. In 2009 he realised Da Guarene all’Etna ‘09, curated by Filippo Maggia at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Guarene CN, IT), a project that will be continued in 2019 with Da Guarene all’Etna 2019, with the same curatorship at the foundation in Guarene. He exhibited in 2010 at Palazzo Strozzi
(Florence, IT), and in the same year, he held exhibitions at Museo Madre in Naples and Mambo in Bologna with the Citytellers project, while in 2011 he took part in a group exhibition at Museion in Bolzano.
In 2013 he exhibited at the Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid, SP) with the project Spectaculum Spectatoris; in the same city in 2009 he took part in an exhibition at the Centro De Arte Dos De Mayo (Madrid, ES) and again in 2007 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofìa (Madrid, ES). He exhibited at Castello di Rivoli (Rivoli, Turin, IT) with a solo exhibition in 2015 entitled American Recordings and in group exhibitions in 2008 and 2014.
In 2016 he exhibited at the Fotomuseum Winterthur (Winterthur, CH), with an exhibition entitled Panorama. In 2017 he had solo exhibitions at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (Tehran, IR) and Palazzo Grassi (Venice, IT) with the project Citytellers, and at CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, (Turin, IT). In 2021 he took part in group exhibitions at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin, IT) and Palazzo Fortuny (Venice, IT). In 2022 he exhibited at BASE progetti per l’arte (Florence, IT) invited by Lorenzo Bruni, while in 2023 he presented the West project for the first time at Galerie Chateau d’Eau (Toulouse, FR). In 2024, the West project was exhibited in a solo show curated by Matteo Balduzzi at the MANN – Archaeological Museum of Naples.
His works are part of numerous Italian and international public and private collections.
Since 2006 he has collaborated with Galleria Umberto di Marino, Naples, where he has held three solo exhibitions: Agent provocateur (2006); so far so long (2010); Cronache (2015); the group exhibitions: Carta Canta (2023) and Why? Because life…(2013); as well as special projects: Grandi Gallerie 02, Museo Licini, Ascoli Piceno (2021); Processo alla Natura, Spazio Maria Calderara, Milan (2018), ten more ten_#6_Cronache_film BAD-Bunker Art Division, Naples (2015).
