PETER SENONER
Peter Senoner
Circus Corpus | Circus Cor
Vernissage, Saturday, 27th July 2019
July 28 – October 05 2019
Press release
comunicato stampa
Pressetext
Galleria Doris Ghetta is pleased to announce its second one-man show by Peter Senoner. The artist has interpreted the exhibition as a dual presentation, split between two different locations: the first, entitled CIRCUS CORPUS CORPUS and staged in the rooms of the gallery, features not only a new sculpture, "ARMAST" (2019), but also the artist’s most recent graphic works. The second, entitled CIRCUS COR, will be on show in the interior and exterior spaces of Senoner’s atelier in Chiusa, and will comprise mainly sculptures and a new large-scale installation conceived as an exterior set for a colossal bronze sculpture.
Two elements that characterize Peter Senoner’s shows are staging and surprise. COR stands on an installation five metres from the ground, its shiny bronze body towering over the surrounding countryside and visible from miles around. Likewise, a large-scale drawing on an enormous canvas dominates a whole room in the gallery.
The circus reference evokes a place where amazement and imagination play a primary role, a field of action for the performances of acrobats and singers and dancers, magicians and exotic animals, and the melodramatic feats of trapeze artists, forever in precarious equilibrium between flight and fall. Whether sculpted or drawn, Peter Senoner’s bodies move like actors in the arena of the contemporary corporeal spectacle, skilfully balancing the highly controversial opposites of human and post-human.
On the one hand, Senoner’s bodies assert themselves clearly as natural beings; on the other, their high-tech characteristics place them on the border between human being and cyborg. The sculptures position themselves in a provocative balance between nakedness and concealment, presenting their polished and sealed surface as the distinctive feature of a machined-designed body in a hybrid commingling with the animal and floral worlds.
These layers and overlays become visible most of all in the artist’s drawings, where he captures bodies with pure graphite on both canvas and wood, alternating thick, almost pictorial lines with gaping voids. In contrast with the obsessive effort evident on the surface of previous works, these new ones reveal amazing lightness and freedom of touch. This aspect, too, represents an acrobatic exercise between the demand for high-level execution and the need for simplicity and unpretentious clarity.