After hosting the one-man shows of Daniele Puppi, vedovamazzei, Adrian Paci, Sislej Xhafa, and Lara Favaretto, Eldorado, the project room at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo that is dedicated to the most interesting young talents on the international art scene, presents Foolish Things, a previously unexhibited project by Roberto Cuoghi.
This project features three works based on the themes of simulation, metamorphosis, and the unstable boundary between public spectacle and the more intimate and personal dimension of each one.
Roberto Cuoghi uses the media of video, photography, installation, and painting to construct an extremely personal artistic universe that contains references to pop culture and the movie world, cartoons, television, and a hybrid blend of irony, poetry, and melancholy.
Although the three works on exhibit at Bergamo were created in the past, they either had never been publicly shown or scarcely been seen on public view before.
Senza titolo (1996-2003) is installed inside the GAMeC bookshop. It embraces visitors and leads them directly into an atmosphere of subtle anxiety and irony: a dense tangle of shrubs enclosed in a small glass pavilion is periodically shaken to suggest the presence of a menacing living being within it.
In contrast, the first room of the Eldorado space features Friendly Neighbourhood (2001), a series of portraits of Andy Warhol that, suspended between pop graphics and a psychedelic ambience, narrate key but lesser-known moments in the story of that artist’s life: from the time when he was a timid, neurotic art student in Pittsburgh, through his dreams of the big metropolis and success, up to his discovery of drugs.
The exhibition concludes with Foolish Things (2002), a video projection set up in the second space of the project room and whose title was borrowed for the entire show. The sun rises at the end of what appears to be an artificial and vaguely melancholy beach, reappearing after having set in a recurring series of dawns and sunsets that recount the alternation between life and death in individual and collective existence. These foolish things is accompanied by a musical score, with a famous love song from the 1930’s that contributes a note of pop melancholy and yearning to this meditation on the eternal cycles of common, everyday life.