Allora Vero

The title of the artist’s solo exhibition, Allora Vero Cezary Bodzianowski curated by Pierre Bal-Blanc, can be interpreted not only as a simple line of titles and credits, but also as a sentence that seems incomplete, requiring an exclamation or question mark to be grammatically correct.

The exhibition proposes to highlight this duality in the reading of reality from its title. The artist’s works favour the invisible gap, frozen time, or suspension of places.

The invitation to the public is to embody physically, throughout the succession of rooms in Palazzo Caracciolo di Avellino, the experience provoked by Cezary Bodzianowski’s works, to follow the spectacle of these «parabases» or these deviations from reality.

This kinetic movement operated by the visitor synchronizes or is asynchronous with the clever editing of the video captures of Cezary Bodzianowski’s gestures documented by his partner Monika Chojnicka, who is also the first witness to the «lazzis» that the artist performs in everyday life, here in Naples or elsewhere.

«Parabase» and «lazzi»: it is indeed a specific vocabulary to which one must refer on the occasion of this Neapolitan exhibition by Cezary Bodzianowski, a terminology that associates the artist’s practice more with that of Pulcinella (a Neapolitan anti-hero present in the frescoes of the princess Caracciolo’s toilet cabinet) rather than that of a dada – which has become by historians a more conventional term to describe any deviation from conventions. Cezary Bodzianowski’s exhibition shows a deeper genealogy that connects us through his works to satyrs, silenuses, and polichinelles.

Text by Pierre Bal-Blanc

Special thanks to the Foksal Gallery Foundation and the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art of Warsaw, Poland.

With the support of the Polish Institute of Rome.

Part of 2023 Programming as part of the project “Rilancio e sostegno della Fondazione Donnaregina – Sez. Progetto XXI” – POR FESR Campania 2014/2020.

Artist’s biography

Performance artist, author of ephemeral artistic activities. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Bodzianowski’s actions are almost imperceptible interventions into reality. The artist is their main character, who with his ephemeral action disrupts the everyday routine. These poetic actions are taking place in public space or in the privacy of home. Later the audience can watch them in films and photos taken by Monika Chojnicka, with whom Bodzianowski has been collaborating since their joint artistic studies in Antwerp. Artist, lives and works in Łódź.

Curator’s biography

Pierre Bal-Blanc is an independent curator and essayist based in Athens and Paris. His most recent project was Ascending Descending Genealogy, Tomislav Gotovac AKA Antonio G. Lauer at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU) Zagreb, 2024; He recently directed the feature film I GOT UP AT 8:59 AM OCT. 19 2021, selected for the competition at Festival Cinéma du Réel, Centre Pompidou Paris in 2023; He curated When I State That I Am an Anarchist after Christopher D’Arcangelo for Plato Ostrava in the Czech Republic in 2022, I GOT UP at Echo Cologne 2022, gb agency Paris and at Hotwheels Athens, 2021 with among others On Kawara, Georgia Sagri, Delia Gonzalez, Serapis Maritime and Sophie Calle.
His last publications are The Continuum Was Performed in the Following Manner. Notes on documenta 14 and Adamo non ha Peccato. Note su documenta 14 (NERO- CAC Geneve 2022).
He was curator under the artistic directorship of Adam Szymczyk for the documenta14 (2015-17) in Athens and Kassel and director of CAC Brétigny in France from 2003 to 2014.