Tim Rollins and K.O.S.
29 Oct - 22 Dec 2010
TIM ROLLINS AND K.O.S.
From October 29th to December 22nd 2010
" Whatever the good be for which a man strives, let him turn his eyes to the heavens and the worlds; there is spread before him a picture, book, a mirror in which he may behold, read, contemplate the imprint ..." Giordano Bruno, DE IMMENSO
Social ransom and emancipation, art and creativity. Every work by Tim Rollins' and his K.O.S., is a gesture of survival to ignorance, to indifference, to denied identity. The result of a challenge that begun in the first part of the 80's, when a young artist offered an alternative to a group of youngsters living in the violent and destitute New York Bronx. What moved Rollins was the conviction he could change the aggressiveness through Dante's poetry, teach tolerance through Martin Luther King's sermons, free emotions by listening the harmonies of Schubert. An art based on the reading of great classics of literature and on the sensations that unexpressed imagination and suffocated energies can evoke. The cathartic creations of Rollins and his Kids of Survivals, take shape on paper: the pages of the literature read together or the sheet music, glued on canvas, become the structure to work upon; waves of words and music notes which interact with graphic and pictorial interventions, visual translation of an emotional content. The consonance between text and painting, evocative and not didactic, resolves in a perfect formal balance: a re-emerging of sensations, of refined thought embellishments in which the concept of sharing replaces the idea of individuality. The clear conviction that team work is a surplus value, so rare in a society that exalts selfishness, permeates of major significances the reading of the words of the Campanian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600), freethinker burnt on the stake of Inquisition for heresy. For the new personal exhibition in the Raucci/Santamaria Gallery six new canvasses will be presented, inspired by three of his most appreciated poems in Latin: De Minimo, De Monade, De Immenso. In these writings Bruno claims the infinity of the universe, animism in all matter, the consistency and the unmeasurability of the spirit, the theory of “God's mirror”. Using the most abundant and essential elements on the planet – aluminium, oxygen and silicon – Rollins and the K.O.S. have covered the book's facsimile pages with a new silver colour made of chemical pigments, realizing a single field of reflecting paint. Mirrored surfaces adorned with silver-coloured drops, delicately fallen from gas clouds obtained by sprinkling spray paint in the air, just in the proximity of the canvas. The paintings attempt to recall the image of an infinite and brilliant universe, microcosms in which matter and space collapse and expand simultaneously, in a perpetual flux in which – according to Bruno's words - “the minimum is also the maximum”. The philosopher's pantheist, ethic and lay thought takes the shape and the light of the constellations, all the mystery of the universe's life in condensed and wrapped in a silver rain.
From October 29th to December 22nd 2010
" Whatever the good be for which a man strives, let him turn his eyes to the heavens and the worlds; there is spread before him a picture, book, a mirror in which he may behold, read, contemplate the imprint ..." Giordano Bruno, DE IMMENSO
Social ransom and emancipation, art and creativity. Every work by Tim Rollins' and his K.O.S., is a gesture of survival to ignorance, to indifference, to denied identity. The result of a challenge that begun in the first part of the 80's, when a young artist offered an alternative to a group of youngsters living in the violent and destitute New York Bronx. What moved Rollins was the conviction he could change the aggressiveness through Dante's poetry, teach tolerance through Martin Luther King's sermons, free emotions by listening the harmonies of Schubert. An art based on the reading of great classics of literature and on the sensations that unexpressed imagination and suffocated energies can evoke. The cathartic creations of Rollins and his Kids of Survivals, take shape on paper: the pages of the literature read together or the sheet music, glued on canvas, become the structure to work upon; waves of words and music notes which interact with graphic and pictorial interventions, visual translation of an emotional content. The consonance between text and painting, evocative and not didactic, resolves in a perfect formal balance: a re-emerging of sensations, of refined thought embellishments in which the concept of sharing replaces the idea of individuality. The clear conviction that team work is a surplus value, so rare in a society that exalts selfishness, permeates of major significances the reading of the words of the Campanian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600), freethinker burnt on the stake of Inquisition for heresy. For the new personal exhibition in the Raucci/Santamaria Gallery six new canvasses will be presented, inspired by three of his most appreciated poems in Latin: De Minimo, De Monade, De Immenso. In these writings Bruno claims the infinity of the universe, animism in all matter, the consistency and the unmeasurability of the spirit, the theory of “God's mirror”. Using the most abundant and essential elements on the planet – aluminium, oxygen and silicon – Rollins and the K.O.S. have covered the book's facsimile pages with a new silver colour made of chemical pigments, realizing a single field of reflecting paint. Mirrored surfaces adorned with silver-coloured drops, delicately fallen from gas clouds obtained by sprinkling spray paint in the air, just in the proximity of the canvas. The paintings attempt to recall the image of an infinite and brilliant universe, microcosms in which matter and space collapse and expand simultaneously, in a perpetual flux in which – according to Bruno's words - “the minimum is also the maximum”. The philosopher's pantheist, ethic and lay thought takes the shape and the light of the constellations, all the mystery of the universe's life in condensed and wrapped in a silver rain.