Aronne Pleuteri
A specifc type of iconoclasm regarding birds
30 September – 30 October 2023
Day Preview – by invitation: Saturday 30th September, 12 – 18
rsvp info@beadvisors-art.co.uk
Evening Private View – public opening: Saturday 30th September, 18 – 21
_______
Collective Ending HQ
3 Creekside, Deptford, SE8 4SA, London
BeAdvisors Art Department is proud to announce its participation to First Edition, presented by Collective Ending and organised by Billy Fraser: a collaboration between nine unique spaces supporting the emerging art ecosystem in London.
For this occasion, BeAdvisors Art Department is presenting the first international appearance of the Italian artist Aronne Pleuteri.
Aronne Pleuteri (b. 2001, Erba) lives and works in Milan. At a young age, he became passionate about music and began studying the transverse fute. An assiduous draftsman with a dream of producing cartoons, Pleuteri soon developed a language akin to the excited climate of his living space. Usingpainting, music, performance and video, the artist actualises his hallucinated visions under the sifting ofa playful attitude that never conceals its bitterness.
“The bird stands in a condition of manifest disparity to man: it has no legs and has apparently found away to turn the gravity problem around. The bird can fy, and the bird can see everything. In short, the bird can. All this power has always provoked in me a great spirit of envy. In addition to the amount of power, the birds is also famous and fashionable.
My uncle once wrote me on WhatsApp that in his own opinion, in recent years the most abused symbolis the wings. And it is true. Although thinking about it, thi image which implies a desire for ascension tothe upward is actually as old as time and implies within itself a sort of dual thinking. I discovered thisin my dissertation on dwarfs. Often the feathered ones, hovering in the subtlest airs and embodying aspiritual principle, were inamic and struggling against the dwarf population, those who are down below,in contact with the ground with the bowels of the earth. In these stories it was often the dwarves whosufered defeat, and to be triumphant was an idea, the idea, such unattainable here in the material world,of contact with the sky.
That is what birds are, even today: a twisted idea of overcoming the human condition, and because theystand so high, in my opinion, it is really impossible to reach them.
I would like to sidle up for fun to this of dual thinking; however, for once, to take the side of the dwarves,of the oppressed. NO TO THE BIRDS! No more swooping fights targeting prey, no more vexatious group pecking, no more annoying squawking, no more jamming the signal of TV antennas by buildingnests of straw. And above all, enough of the latent threat of heavenly shit rain. In short, enough of those who live on clouds, and those who, despite this condition of evident inequality compared to man, do not even give up its abuse and exercise of violence!
Now, it is clear that the birds did nothing to me, and that all this is just imaginative schizophrenia. Not this world, but the other, the world of images, of symbols, of the collective psyche. Is that as real as this one?
In any case, I always need reality to reveal itself to me and bring down my castle of fake beliefs. I am going to comfort myself not with the image of a bird, but with a real birds. Despite appearences, I seek an approach of empathy with the animal, which, like us, without having asked for it, is invested with an image and a historical burden. I invented an Ornithological Photodevice to cancel the image of the bird: the attempt to deny the bird is precisely the attempt to free it from its own image.”
Aronne Pleuteri
Aronne Pleuteri, Omino tormentato dai corvi 2, 2023, oil on canvas, 70 x 60 cm
Aronne Pleuteri’s practice is enlivened by joking and playful attitudes, characterising components seen as aesthetical and gnosiological devices.
With a narration setting evoking the childhood golden mith and its naive lightheartedness, the artistre-semantics the surrounding reality, the experiential perceptions through which men relate with it and refects on the static nature and the monolithic appearance of cultural statements, often passively incorporated into each one’s visive and moral archive.
Within a dense network of symbols rooted in Western culture and society, the artist insists on a paradoxical imaginary which tells a possible and necessary return to the earth and appears as thelogical deconstruction of verticality and horizontality, foundations of Western thought.
In these split and destruction of logical and force relationships, the artist uses images bringing the perception of the order of magnitude at the end of its tether, such as referring to the image of dwarfs and giants.
His works originate directly from his personal experience and memories, avoiding a proper autobiographical narration for giving voice to a more collective psyche.
Despite the presence of fantastical or apotropaic figures, the relationship with reality is needed to reveal its inner essence, bring down each one’s castle beliefs and try to build new perspectives. Moving between many media, the artist experiments with different communication and relation channels with the viewer. The artist attempts to free images from their own cultural, social and iconographical limits through the use of media and freak images: the viewer looks at the artist’s research as a continuous iconoclasm act in which every type of conviction could be overturned upside down.
