NOVE ELEFANTI BIANCHI E UNA PATATA

Gallery Side 2, Tokyo, Japan, 2014

Dissident towards the global production system, Michelangelo Consani researchs on sustainability, social equity, but also and above all, on History conducting an investigation, both individually and collectively. “The world of sense in which Consani attempts overlooking, writes Pier Luigi Tazzi commenting the exhibition project “The party is over“, is an incoherent and open world at the same time, the artist moves into with the tools of language, of myth – especially in Barthes’ sense of the term – and art, in which the exchange between the symbolic and the nature is constant, where levels of meaning – objective, expressive and documentary – slipping continuously the one into the other, the one upon the other. So the party that is over is the one that had taken place for centuries under the constellation of ideas, notions, but also of beliefs and prejudices that had illuminated the so-called Western Culture, and had given rise to a vision of a “world dominated and possessed by a snapshot totalizing summary.”

In Asia and Indochina white elephants are traditionally a symbol of good luck and prosperity. In Anglo-Saxon countries, on the contrary, the name “white elephant” is given to luxury goods or imposing projects, whose excessive costs of construction and operation are not offset by the benefits that give or could give in the case have not been made. Consani’s project at Gallery Side 2 plays on the double meaning of this expression.

Through a series of metric measurements, Consani locates the center of the gallery and he states that, in setting his installation, this point coincides perfectly with a precise geographical area of the world, the Caspian depression, or the Aralo – Caspian Basin where Asia and Europe meet. In this center, the artist places two sculptures in black Belgian marble, this is a rare materia quite used up nowdays that well represents the West. Between the two sculptures Consani puts a potato in ‘metaphysical suspension’, it would represent exchange or collision, good or bad. Besides, from this hypothetical center, corresponding to the geographical locations of birth/origin, the artist places the minor persons, “elephants”: agronomists, scientists, economists, creating a kind of mapping of the world and in the world of those individual personalities that can help us to find a way to reach a more equitable, convivial and sustainable society. Only the exceptional nature of certain minor persons could save from the ‘clash’ between the emerging capitalist system and the moribund Western model, seems to suggest the artist. Michelangelo Consani draws his subjects from everyday life and history, his work takes away from the concept of sculpture as a commemorative monument. The artist sets its installation in the transience of the moment and in abstraction from visual data, thereby jeopardizing the duration of the work itself.