Nanni Balestrini. Vogliamo tutto [We want everything]
in collaboration with Mudima Foundation, Milan

Eva Sauer. A meditation on violence

Pyotr Pavlensky. 439754
in collaboration with PACK Gallery, Milan

Frittelli arte contemporanea inaugurates the summer season with three exhibitions dedicated to three artists different in generation and operative typology, ideally linked by reflection on political and existential themes, by investigating into the mechanisms of power and the forms of control and censorship inherent in communication and in the architectural spaces of contemporary society.

Nanni Balestrini. Vogliamo tutto [We Want It All], in collaboration with the Mudima Foundation (Milan), presents the visual production of Nanni Balestrini (Milan, 1935) from the 1970s and 1980s, which recreates - as Manuela Gandini writes in the text accompanying the exhibition - the social and political atmosphere of the leaden and Reagan years. From the gloomy succession of heavy words, full of oil and disquiet, to the more colorful and apparently light collages and gouaches of the 1980s. The vision of Vogliamo tutto [We Want It All] - a title expropriated from Balestrini's cult book (1971) that inspired entire generations with the story of the worker Alfonso - is a synthesis of human illusions and the unchallenged power of media representation. The shredded sentences and letters are apocalyptic and light at the same time. With a good dose of clairvoyance, these works anticipate the advent of virtuality and its hidden dangers. The manifestation of that anthropophagous techno-world made of videos and words that eat reality. Also on display is the installation 100 fiori sessantotto [One hundred flowers '68] created by Balestrini especially for the exhibition: a composition of Tavole [Panels], graphic elaborations of collages from the late 1960s - early 1970s, and Cento fiori [One hundred flowers], combinatorial color games from Potere Operaio [Worker Power] (1969).

The Rooms host the solo exhibition by Eva Sauer (Florence, 1973): A meditation on violence is an investigation into public architectural spaces. Some show how the various holders of power, through time, have built walls, barriers and buildings so that through architecture they can impose rules, control citizens and finally propagandize for the “regent”.

Others, however, tell of Mafia infiltration in the construction companies - witnesses are various architectural unfinished buildings constructed with such poor material that the forces of nature, smoothing stairs, creeping through plants whose roots split the excessively sandy cement, turned the buildings into sculptures. 

A meditation on violence questions the human mentality, but also nature itself: in many images of dystopian cinema, rampant nature regains what has been taken from it: a process that instils a feeling of peace and security. However, if we look more closely, we see plants suffocating each other in an attempt to win a place in the light. The seemingly peaceful return to nature is nothing more than a struggle for survival and continuity. Humanity pursues this struggle on a different level; but unlike other animals and plants, we leave traces: endless ruins.

The Rooms are also the backdrop for the chronicle in images of some of the most extreme actions of the Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky (Leningrad, 1984), whose artistic practice is driven by a sincere desire to focus attention on social and political injustices in today's Russia and to put his finger on major issues such as politics, human rights, censorship and freedom of expression and thought. The title of the exhibition realized in collaboration with the PACK Gallery (Milan), 439754, represents the number assigned to him in prison where he is currently awaiting trial following his last action in which he set fire to the door of the Banque de France headquarters in Place de la Bastille in Paris. The exhibition will feature large-format photographs and several documentary shots depicting moments of five different actions, taken over a period of five years. Pyotr's art is non-commercial: to honor his thinking, the works are not for sale.