Valentino Vannini & The Phoenix Garden

About

Valentino Vannini’s art practice lures the viewer towards a “lurky” place, a term Stephen Willats coined to describe an urban-natural hinterland where pursuits which do not normally occur within institutional, conformist society can take place. Vannini playfully reinterprets the lurky place through a queer lens by bringing gay cruising grounds to the fore. In so doing, he reimagines cruising as both resistance to rigid social norms and a celebration of marginalised identities.

Vannini’s latest exhibition at The Phoenix Garden invites audiences into an evocative blend of art, nature, and architecture. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of vision as a form of touch, Vannini engages viewers in a sensory experience, encouraging them to step into a perceptual arena in which the act of looking becomes embodied, turning seeing into a physical experience. Visitors exploring the garden’s winding paths engage in a hide-and-seek which mirrors the performativity of cruising—happening upon the artwork while getting lost in the surroundings.

Central to Vannini’s approach is the casting process. For this exhibition, he has harvested natural materials from Hampstead Heath and has cast them in resin and glass fibre. Here, ‘slippage’, displacement and transmutation happen simultaneously, transferring the very matter of one lurky place into another and turning the natural into the artificial.

Though cast in resin, Vannini’s material choices evoke a sense of impermanence and vulnerability. Influenced by Gordon Matta-Clark’s ideas on the balance between support and collapse, Vannini’s sculptures are poised between stability and fragility, echoing both the structures around them and our own bodies. For Vannini, casting is a highly tactile, almost epidermic process, which blurs the lines between the real and the imagined. In the dynamic setting of the garden, this blurring is amplified, inviting viewers to hold multiple tensions at once, and to experience his work as tactile encounters that deepen their connection to the artwork and the space.