Patrizio Di Massimo: Inside Me

About

The show, titled Inside Me, revolves around themes and productions significant to the last years of the artist’s research and includes paintings, sculptures and installation.Often in spiritual paths, a fundamental part of the journey consists on embracing the fact that the entire universe lies within us. If all the ideas, answers, concerns are inside us, how to access them? One way entails standing still, and listening.

Patrizio Di Massimo’s exhibition does what its title suggests. It is a journey through visions and emotions that ripple in the artist’s mind. Existence is articulated through duality, where every notion has its opposite to balance out reality. In five of the six new paintings presented in the exhibition, duality is expressed figuratively with two characters: a man and a woman, which also happen to be the artist and his wife. They engage in various actions, but it would be wrong to confuse these actions with masquerades. The couple is not acting or faking, instead it is caught in the moment where the experience becomes what ones mind manifests through emotions and visions. If love and fear are the basic opposite sentiments that trigger all the various other nuances of feelings, then each painting fearlessly embraces the necessity of dichotomies. 

In “I am mad at you” for instance anger and antagonism runs up against a pitch-dark background, the couple grab each other by hair and neck while she kicks him and he pulls her jumper. Both facial expressions triggered by rage and frustration. “I am a pink lady” continues the thematic of female domination while “I am Count Dracula” portrays the artist as the dark Transylvanian character in the act of waking up from the coffin rest. Both “I am listening” and “I am fulfilled” introduce a gentler nuance, where the interior world is made of confessed erotic fantasies and domestic cuddles.

The only painting that doesn’t have a couple conducting the scene, titled “I am abducted”, explores the inside/outside duality using the body as the sole barrier that divides the two worlds. Opening the body can literally free you from the human condition, making you one with the whole. Clearly, the process doesn’t come without some painful moments.

The exhibition also presents two new enlarged decorated tassels, which are part of a series of sculptures initiated few years ago that transforms decorative items into personified elements, elevating the status of an object to a subject that calls for attention. If the paintings look on the inside as a form of meditative journey, the sculptures address the body as a gorgeous and laud effect of existence. The tassels are all hand made with such skills and attention to details that once more we are reminded that beauty comes with dedication and total commitment.

“I am heraldic” is constructed through patterns of renaissance reminiscence, where the artist’s palette of pinks and blacks interweave in an anthropomorphised stem. The shape of the tassel also calls to mind the chess’s pawn, or the infantryman, a theme close to the artists that few times depicted armours and warriors. “I am magenta” counterbalance the virile presence of the first tassel with a feminine, matriarchal, presence. Magenta is the colour of universal harmony and emotional balance, the colour of the seventh chakra and spiritual enlightenment. 

Downstairs in the basement floor, one of Di Massimo’s most recognisable cushion’s installations from 2013 stands peaceful and mysterious. The work, also titled “Inside me”, was the first one in a series of custom made cushion’s installations, all activated by performers hidden inside the structure, exposing limbs through the gaps. Here the thresholds are blurred as hands and feet can break through the cushion pyramid and can be seen at times, while the rest is left to one’s own imagination.

There is a Buddhist say that goes: the true Buddha sits in the interior. In the gallery space, architecturally reminiscent of the labyrinthine shape of an apartment, Di Massimo’s artworks stand as milestones on the journey that brings one individual to familiarise with their own personal truth. And as often is the case, the more you get close to it, the more ironic it all feels.

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Patrizio Di Massimo (born Jesi, Italy, 1983) lives and works in London. He graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London.

In 2012 he was selected as a finalist in the “Premio Italia 2012”, hold at MAXXI, Rome. In 2010 he co-curated the exhibition, “More Pricks Than Kicks” with Vincent Honoré at the David Roberts Art Foundation, London and in 2009 he had his first solo presentation within the program “Zilkha Auditorium” at Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include: “Inside Me”, ChertLüdde, Berlin, 2018; “Grim Tales”, Cassina Projects, New York, 2017; “Bread and Circuses”, Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, 2017; “vitrine”, NICC, Brussels, 2016; “Nipson anomemata me monan opsin”, Monteverdi Gallery, 2015; “Are, Ere, Ire”, T293 Rome, 2014; “Me, Mum, Mister, Mad”, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, 2014; “The Lustful Turk, Gaswork”, London, 2013; Il Turco Lussurioso, Villa Medici, Rome, 2012; and a performance at the Stedelijk Museum as part of the public program, 2012.

Recent group exhibitions include: “Somatechnics”, Museion, Bollzano, 2018 (upcoming); EVA International, Ireland’s Biennal of Contemporary Art, Limerick, 2018; “Total Anastrophes”, Dhakar Art Summit, Volcano Extravaganza, 2018; “Through the Looking Glass”, Palazzo Capris, Turin, 2017; “Take me (I’m Yours), Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2017; “Grim Tales”, Cassina Project, New York, 2017; “Sette Messaggeri”, Marselleria, Milan, 2017; “Predictions, Mendes Wood Gallery, Sao Paolo, 2016; “Mundus Muliebris” Cura Basement, Rome, 2016; “Ennesima”, Triennale, Milan,2015; “I am here but you have gone”, Fiorucci Art Trust, London, 2015; “Don’t you know who I am”, M HKA, Antwerp, 2014; “Portrait of the Artist as a young man”, Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli, 2014; “Baker and Le Courbusier in Rio, a transatlantic affair”, Museo do Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, 2014; “The 338 Hour Cineclub”, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, 2013; “It may be that beauty has strengthened our resolve”, ParaSite, Hong Kong, 2013.

Collections: Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Fiorucci Art Trust, London.