'Brainstorming' with Loris Cecchini and Michelangelo Consani at ieedificio57 in Italy

Italian artists Loris Cecchini and Michelangelo Consani are currently showcasing their novel body of work at ieedificio57, a contemporary art gallery and non-profit research centre for the visual arts in San Gimignano, Italy. The art exhibition titled Brainstorming, on view from September 15, 2024 - February 10, 2025, showcases Cecchini's site-specific installations and Consani's deeply visceral sculptures. 

This exhibition by ieedificio57 (thanks to Galleria Continua) offers a unique opportunity to engage with innovative artistic practices in the beautifully restored historic building of the art gallery, whose name references the Japanese word for 'building', which is ie. Transformed from a family home in an ancient building, the premises of ieedificio57 comprise exhibition spaces on two levels and an underground project room named Zattera (Raft).

Spearheaded by Consani, this new cultural platform intends to establish connections between the artist's practice and various personalities from the art world. Through this medium, Consani seeks to better understand the sensibilities and planning processes of the hosted artist by forging a dialogue with another artist towards whom he feels a sense of 'sentimental affinity'. Within this newly restored building, the first artist invited into a dialogue of this nature is Loris Cecchini, under the moniker Brainstorming.

Brainstorming consists of a series of previously unseen and site-specific works, specially created for this art exhibition. At the heart of Cecchini's work is a new reading of spatiality in which physical space is interpreted as something biological, organic and vital, and simultaneously as a rationally structured, mechanically produced, perfectly artificial phenomenon, and above all, endowed with the functionality of an organic-structural matrix.

Cecchini's Tropism (Thin thing) is a modular, large-scale installation composed of hundreds of polished steel elements that move in space like a climber's diagram. The art installation is presented in large-scale formations distributed across the floor, the walls and the ceiling of the exhibition space in a spontaneous manner. The quadripolar module acts as a vectoral agent that instantly allows the viewer to notice a dynamic of growth where points and lines recall the idea of nature as a mathematical structure or a scientific derivation. The word tropism is derived from the Ancient Greek term τρέπομαι (trépomai) and translates to 'to turn'. It refers to the movement of the various organs of a plant (roots, stems, leaves, flowers, etc.) in response to environmental stimuli usually prompted by a chemical or physical agent.

Zigzags particles by Cecchini comprises a new series of art sculptures in cast aluminium. Birds perched on small structures is filled to the brink with the idea of matter in transformation. The granular/ particle forms of which the birds are created, transpire in continuous deformation during which their orientation and density suggest the actual making of these subjects through aggregation and disintegration. It represents a sense of transitional morphology that avoids confinement and finds analogies in the chemical-physical processes of molecular aggregation.

Cecchini plays with analogies materially present with the creation of virtual models and their composition through point clouds that define the qualities and characteristics of the subject as observed through scanning. The material that makes up the sculptural art pieces becomes a visual vehicle for an image on the brink of kinetic transition as if the reference object is transforming into something else, flowing from one state of matter to another in a high-density liquid metamorphosis.

Invariably predisposed to research and experimentation, the sculpture artist intently focuses on innovative materials, particularly plastics and metals and on processes related to their growth, accumulation and crystallisation. For this exhibition, and for the first time, he has worked with graphite, experimenting on wool paper and linen canvas. His research resulted in a piece displayed on a wall as well as a site-specific installation placed in the Zattera room. The monochrome yet vibrant surface of Aeolian Landforms (black drawing) reminds us of air and water erosion. Saturating our gaze with black that completely floods the site of the work, eccentric vibrations propagate on the surface of the canvas just as sand dunes arrange themselves in a natural landscape. The surface's hypnotic undulation presents a metaphor for interiority but also landscape colour as an emotional field. The mineral quality of the polished graphite surface on hundreds of paper fragments reassembled to recreate a particle whole, a particular reference to the use of graphite in drawing brings forth a certain link with the idea of the sublime.

The work titled KNO3C is installed underground in the building's old stone and brick cellar. Creating a spatial-physical-temporal continuum with the space that hosts it, the work is a three-dimensional low-relief feature that reworks the image of potassium nitrate crystals (KNO3) as seen under a microscope. The graphite (carbon) design relief rises from the surface of the floor, similar to how saltpetre has formed on the walls due to humidity over time.

Taking inspiration from the theories of Austrian theologian Ivan Illich, and following through his work since the 1990s, Consani continues to expand his reflections on the relationship between production and degrowth, and the dominant political system and the marginal people. For Brainstorming, he presents a series of works that share the common title Il seme dell’uomo or The Seed of Man, a direct reference to Marco Ferreri's 1969 film that reflects on the looming apocalypse. Occupying two corridors and three rooms on the main floor of ieedificio57, Consani stages a project that manifests as a small museum of humanity and takes us on a journey of culture, history and the language of design.

Consani's graphite drawings, referred to as Constellations and depicting primates, are stationed near the show's entrance. Consani captures the look, expressions and gestures of primates in an effort to remind us that mankind shares part of its evolutionary process with apes; or perhaps, to make us retrace the message that director Stanley Kubrick expressed with his film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In the first room, Consani presents two fundamental chairs from the history of design which, as in a Duchampian game, become the basis for his sculptures: two heads, one made of bronze, the other of Belgian black marble (Noir Belge). The first chair is Hill Hause 1. Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and built in 1902, the chair is still considered an authentic treatise on spatial articulation. Inspired by Japanese arts, the Scottish architect established connections between full and empty—a subject that is also frequently revisited by Consani. The second chair design, Gerrit Thomas Rietveld's Red & Blue from 1917, is not just an armchair but represents one of the greatest masterpieces of the Dutch De Stijl movement of which Rietveld was part.

In the next room, one comes across two other chairs, The Masters Chair and Mezzadro, which in Consani's practice once again become pedestals for two sculptures. Designed by Philippe Starck and Eugeni Quitllet, the former is a tribute to three of the most iconic chairs of all time: Arne Jacobsen’s Series 7 Chair, Eero Saarinen’s Tulip Chair and Charles Eames’s Eiffel Chair. The profiles of the backrests of these three seats are overlapped and intertwined to create a hybrid with the intention that The Masters Chair may one day also hold an emblematic place in the field of design. A sizable concrete head rests on it.

When Achille Castiglioni and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni designed Mezzadro in 1970, they thought of an object that could be made with readily available components used in the agriculture industry. In fact, Mezzadro consists of three parts—all of which are tractor components—an iron seat, a crossbow and a crossbar. Another example in which, for the artist, the seat serves as the basis for a sculpture: a woman's face in intimate exchange with the work positioned across the room.

The exhibition culminates with a wooden crate normally used for the transport of goods accommodating a terracotta bust of the Japanese agronomist, Masanobu Fukuoka. The room is lit up by a video projection of a cicada that disperses energy. A simple and spontaneous act of love during which the insect, unlike in the rat race created by humanity, is not conditioned by the harassing demands of production.