Risky Hardware

About

Almost two years ago Galleria Ramo opened its doors in Como for the very first time. This initial cycle of 12 exhibitions featuring 13 artists, 4 curators and numerous local and international collaborations, built the foundations for the development of the gallery.

Over the last few months, Benedetta and Simon transformed this lifeless and almost forgotten laundromat into their new home, evolving the role as a gallery and always believing in their future, their artists and their work.

Galleria Ramo opens its new headquarters in Como, with a double solo show of two emerging artists: Hyun Cho (Seoul, 1982) and Nicolò Masiero Sgrinzatto (Padua, 1992). United by their current residency at Viafarini, in Milan, but above all - in the specificity of the individual artistic researches - they manage to show a surprising ease in the approach to common objects and materials, reworked to create works of art that are fresh and contemporary, but at the same time are deliberately risky conceptualisations.

The new space consists of two exhibition halls; the corpus of works presented by each of the two artists are rather compact and this has resulted in an almost exclusive attribution of the rooms to a single artist.

The young Paduan artist Nicolò Masiero Sgrinzatto presents the first chapter of the project Altro giro, altra corsa, a series of works that arise from a risky game - that of the bumper car - made reproducible to infinity through a risky operation that deserves to become a legend.

You can freely ride on the bumper cars only if you possess a special plastic passepartout key, available only to amusement park owners. These keys therefore have a high specific value, that of a game that is finally free, in a world where you pay for everything, especially for fun. For the artist it is "a metaphor of incessant conflict, confrontation and self-confrontation.”

The keys are made in different and interesting shapes, and the artist decided to reproduce them - enlarging them several times - in natural and nickel-plated iron. A metalworker friend of the artist advised against contacting the factory for which he worked but rather he would smuggle the works out: as the owner mistreated him and would not have understood the importance of the artistic concept. So he offered to make them himself in the company and to subtract them - level by level (some keys are made up of up to seven levels) - hiding these metal parts on his person. This action will be rewarded by the artist with litres of craft beer and the accomplice, anonymously, will participate in the vernissage of the exhibition.

At this point the artist celebrates his friends risky action of exhibiting, in addition to the eight large metal keys, an iron-beer barter contract and the declaration of intent of theft, in A4 format, laser engraved on iron using a binary code. In fact, the key allows you to open and close the electric circuit of the bumper, therefore it operates in a binary on/off mode, just like the sequences from 0 to 1 on the exposed plates. Finally, Masiero Sgrinzatto exhibits a last iron A4 in Como, other four A4’s in metal, contain the pdf file of the train tickets documenting the journey his accomplice, as a complementary testimony of a transfigured conflict thanks to a current and very epically pop artistic endeavour.

In the second room of the gallery houses the works of Hyun Cho, and in particular works that develop in light art practices in a peculiar way. The invitation presents, for example, a small neon work UP TO 200% OFF, whose impossible advertising appeal (you cannot discount a price more than one hundred percent) reaches the passersby sideways right on the street outside. A possible street that is the territory par excellence of skaters, and the skate seems to be a fetish vehicle for the Korean artist, who in all the other works on display uses parts of it, usually recreated in coloured and untouched resin. These are precise and radical assemblies, where wheels and other components coexist with other technical materials: aluminum segments placed side by side or crossed and precisely light elements: LED strips that give the work a playful and slightly vain shining.

Her only non-luminous work is defeated to the other room: a modern bas-relief where resin and plaster outline the essence of a skate in the form of an artistic work. Hyun Cho's attention to colours - within the colours, leds and neon lights - as well as to the often shiny surfaces of the materials used is remarkable. Hyun has chosen to take risks, creating sculptures that are the result of unusual unions and that bring themselves to light. In them we find the willingness to understatement the present, for example seen, in the manga culture and in k-pop, a worldwide custom phenomenon born in your South Korea.

These works are a true expression of the artist’s cultural mix,  having lived for many years in New York before settling in Europe. There she perceived a great energy and freedom in using a skateboard on the streets. Relevant is her intent to articulate these sensations and aspirations, reworking in particular those that are the syneddochi of the skate, perfect and frictionless wheels.