Umberto Chiodi, STANZA DEI VARCHI

Room 7

31 March 2010. The asymmetry of the walls, the original terracotta flooring and the large window looking out onto the inner garden give the room a temporal detachment and a light that remind me of the silences of childhood. This room, which Testori used as a library and which I now see disturbingly empty, seems to me to contain a secret, as if suspended and veiled. The room itself seems to me like a threshold, a curtain to be lifted. As I walk, I believe I am making a metaphorical invasion into the organism, the interiority and the anteriority of the house. May 2010. I thought of a large red velvet curtain fixed to the wall, slightly open to reveal the lack of a real passage. Around it on the wall, as if suspended in a dialogue between two and three dimensions, I draw anthropomorphic figures representing the tensions of a pulsional disorder. The figures are like sphinxes on either side of a theatrical illusory gap. At the centre of the composition in the works on paper and in the assemblage, the opening is an emptied coat of arms, deprived of the symbol of a social-political order or the mark of a Nobility. Nobility understood above all as Beauty and elevation. The actual or illusory lack of something central within the work is an experience of emptiness for the viewer. The work denies itself, the induced vision denies itself. That gap – white sheet or real breakthrough – is equivalent to a mirror, it is the heart of death, it transcends the work itself.
Umberto Chiodi

Childhood as a backdrop, the unconscious as a horizon, take on a highly dramatic temperature in Chiodi’s work because they are used by the artist to initiate a discourse on the visceral. Viscerality is a primary way of looking at the world, a system of pre-rational relations, unrelated and not necessarily motivated, in direct contact with the imaginary and strong enough to construct the discourse. Unnecessary, gratuitous, the relations of meaning that the imaginary creates have to do with the world of childhood once the latter has become an emblem of drive disorder against the rational order. Thus, the emblem of a clash, of a contradiction, of a tension. The imaginary is opposed, at least in aesthetic strategies, to the discourses of order, and Umberto Chiodi’s recent work takes on childhood, turning it from an implicit theme into an intention, a tension, which oversees the shaping of the work itself.
Giorgio Verzotti

Umberto Chiodi was born in Bentivoglio in 1981. He lives and works in Milan. He exhibited for the first time in 2003 at the Accademia d’Arte in Bologna. In 2006 he held a solo exhibition entitled Asfodelo at Studio d’Arte Cannaviello in Milan. In 2007 he took part in the group shows Arte Italiana, 1968-2007 at Palazzo Reale in Milan, Dopamine at Studio d’Arte Cannaviello and the exhibition Semplicitas, Duplicitas at Galleria Schultz Contemporary in Berlin. In 2008, the National Gallery of Fine Arts in Sofia dedicated the solo exhibition Umberto Chiodi to him. In 2009 the exhibition Superfetazione was held in Milan at Studio d’Arte Cannaviello.