Dark Matters

Sandro Setola sketches a grim world in monumental charcoal drawings, animations, and video installations. Universal themes such as isolation, destruction, growth, and decay are common in his work. In his installation ‘Retreat (I know I can’t win)’, consisting of a maquette and a projection of an underground-city labyrinth, sombre-looking architecture becomes the bearer of ideas about the mental world, giving an unexpectedly confrontational expression of the emotions and their battles.

Dario D’Aronco presented a series of purist, minimalist sound installations inspired by the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, who, straight after WW2, wanted to compose music for a new world. Each note should sound the same, because the space and the ears of the listener naturally lead to everyone hearing a different sound. D’Aronco searches for the point where the listener’s ear generates meaning from the purest possible sound. Where image is as absent as possible.

Fiona Weir’s photographs gradually reveal their subject. In her photographs of natural environments or abandoned places, the only visible human presence is in a shadow or a trail in the grass, where culture and nature blend. She is looking for the point where the figure seems to appear on-screen or where it just disappears from view. Her languid, melancholic images seem to have resigned themselves to an existential loneliness.

Silvia B. presented a series of photographs and sculptures in which the circus functions as a world where beauty and disgust, emotion and horror, compete for precedence. Silvia B.’s creatures are both attractive and disturbing: they look human, but are definitely artificial. In the world of the circus, everything is possible and reality hangs by a thread. What is good can be bad, and vice versa; our true self is covered with a thin veneer of civilisation that is easily scratched away.

In Renie Spoelstra’s monumental charcoal drawing, the wind blown branches of a tree give visibility to the darkness of a deep forest. Spoelstra is not to trying to capture a specific location— she is reducing a concrete image to a universal concept. She looks for the moment when an image is located at a dead point, like the dead point in the swing of a swing, where nothing happens, where threat is palpable in the moments before or after.

Her interest in the sublime made Marielle Buitendijk turn to three-dimensional work. The graphs in which mathematical laws are expressed are at the root of her three-dimensional wall reliefs, which, although made according to algorithmic mathematical principles, impersonate chaotic growths.