His Piccolo Albanese had already been here. And it is no coincidence that Aleksander Velišček now returns to Casa Testori with a solo exhibition in which he presents other giants, completely different in scale from the one that had been shown on this wall in 2012, on the occasion of the group show Happy Days. That was, in that case, a five-meter portrait of a fellow art student, an Albanian boy of short stature, magnified to symbolize the importance of his role in the artist’s education.
The figures that now populate the grand staircase of Giovanni Testori’s birthplace are also cornerstones in Velišček’s personal and cultural development. They too are giants, as revealed by the title of the series to which they belong: Gullivers. The name refers, on the one hand, to Jonathan Swift’s novel, and on the other to the language invented by Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, an evident contextualization of the artist’s research within what could be defined as a socio-political field.
These are portraits of writers, painters, politicians, philosophers, modeled as though they were sculptures in the round, with paint dripping over the edge of the panel, fraying the borders into fragments. These circles—geometric figures that symbolize perfection—are thus deformed by layers of paint, by brushstrokes that pile up and render the faces increasingly unrecognizable. The extreme close-ups eliminate any contextualization: what remains is only the human being—or rather, only the head. This, according to the artist, is the essence of fidelity to a value, here expressed in the clash between the ideal and the real. An opposition that turns into violence and mutilation in these heads with slashed throats, sometimes with bulging eyes and mouths agape, crying out their final oration or the curse of the Gorgon.
The very idea of removal from context, from the environment in which these intellectuals lived and matured their thought, is enacted in the portrait of Giovanni Testori: enclosed in a double-glass case that both preserves and distances him. Of the master of the house only the face remains, while the body is replaced by a metallic structure suggestive of constraint and surgery, where screws blend into flesh.
Aleksander Velišček was born in 1982 in Šempeter pri Gorici, Slovenia. He lives and works between Nova Gorica (Slovenia) and Lugano (Switzerland).
In 2010 he graduated in Visual Arts and Performing Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. In 2012 he was an artist-in-residence at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation studios in Venice; in the same year he won the Mariuccia Paracchi Testori Prize after taking part in the group show Happy Days at Casa Testori. In 2015 he was artist-in-residence at Viafarini, Milan; Dolomiti Contemporanee, Borca di Cadore; and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. He has taken part in solo and group exhibitions in Italy, Slovenia, and Austria, including: Shit & Die, curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Myriam Ben Salah, and Marta Papini (Turin, 2014); Gullivers, curated by Aurora Fonda (AplusA, Venice, 2016).
Thanks to MLZ Art Dep, Trieste.
[1] Giorgio Agamben. The Open: Man and Animal, Turin, 2002, p. 33
