Palazzo Chupi Mixed-media installation: 2 walls, projected video 3' 30'' in loop, 1 director's chair, 2 wall texts, video 23' 23'' on monitor
2008-2015
Exhibition views at Optica, Montreal: Paul Litherland
Palazzo Chupi takes its title from a
Julian Schnabel real estate project: in 2007, the American painter and
filmmaker added seven stories in Venetian architectural style to a
former stable that he occupied in Manhattan’s West Village. The
artistic and commercial ambitions of this eccentric and controversial
gesture were ultimately curtailed by the building’s gaudy aesthetic and
the 2008 fi nancial meltdown. (…) Beyond its interrogations of urban
gentri cation, the preservation of architectural heritage, or the
dynamics of rampant speculation in the financial sector and art
market, the exhibition invites spectators to "pass through the image",
figuratively and literally speaking, while demonstrating that history,
like all narratives, is a construction.
Palazzo Chupi articulates several elements, including a video
presentation of 21 drawings attributed to Sherwood Darnell, a man who
once occupied a prison cell that faced the site on which this palazzo
now presides. His drawings depict the location’s evolution, from the
beginning of time to some point in the distant future. Not only does
this new body of work testify to the evolution of the West
Village—replacing a linear conception of time with its cyclical
representation—it also reveals a singular, and heretofore unknown
artistic itinerary. Darnell thus serves as a foil to the famed Schnabel
(conspicuously absent here). The parallel history on which the
exhibition sheds light appears ultimately to crystallize in an
exhibition space divided into two distinct areas, the one public, the
other hidden, a spatial dichotomy that prompts us to explore the hidden
side of things.
