Upstairs: Falke Pisano

About

In this selection of works spanning from 2006 to 2009, Falke Pisano questions modes of making and understanding abstract sculptural objects. In particular, how we feel in relation to these objects and how they perform the relationship between author, object and viewer. These questions form one of the mainstays of Pisano’s practice.

Conceptual reconstruction concerning form: the object, 2008, consists of three digital collages that have been framed together with short texts. The images show partial views of works in progress in Pisano’s studio in Villa Arson. Using the framework of the number 3 each sculpture is an attempt to con ate either three different works or three different points of view. The rst; making an object out of a singular view of three abstract sculptures, the second; a large scale sculpture from three Joseph Albers drawings, and the third; three sculptures in response to three novels: Period by Dennis Cooper, Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima and The invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. With an interest in the process of thinking as a form of making, Pisano proposes that the ideas formulated in the text be treated as an object. The texts thus address the failure or abandonment of a work whilst simultaneously negating this failure by transforming the material object of the sculpture into the immaterial object of an idea.

On a monitor three video works are played in sequence. Studio Lecture, 2006, 42 min, invites the viewer to follow the artist’s process of developing an understanding of how an object can exist in different conditions, questioning if an object can also exist in the form of an idea. A Sculpture Turning into a Conversation, 2006, 25 min, addresses the phenomena of transformation. This work exists in several modes, as a live lecture and as a double projection with voice-over and sculpture. In the video work a voice-over reads a text in which a sculpture transforms (is transformed) into a conversation, the left side of the image shows a camera going over a collection of images, diagrams and notes whilst the right hand side image shows a series of photographs. Chillida (forms and feelings), 2006, DVD, 2 channel, 14 min, is

an account of Pisano’s response to a series of photographs taken by David Finn of sculptures by the Basque sculptor Chillida. While going through the pages of the photo-book Pisano tries to trace the relationship between the characteristics of these speci c objects, their depiction and the experience of the photographer and his daughter, as well as Pisano’s own existential preoccupations.

Three performance posters point to moments of live enactments of Pisano’s thinking around the construction, transformation and reception of abstract objects.