Leon d’Oro

Fondazione Morra Greco is glad to announce Leon d’Oro, an exhibition by Douglas Gordon and Jonathan Monk with four new films, a mysterious gastronomic performance and others surprises. Curated by Mirta d’Argenzio.

Even if the two artists have worked together before, this is the first time they present a unique collaboration specifically dedicated to Naples with a new project made for the Foundation.

Douglas Gordon and Jonathan Monk share the same interest in food, drinks, performance, found images, texts and they have used in the past found film footage and photographs in several of their works. Space or time became the obsessive subject of their investigations.

In Naples the pleasure of improvisations with the spirit of the early instruction pieces is back again. As they continues today the exploration of art as idea first instigated by the conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s.

Douglas Gordon (1966, Glasgow) has manipulated and slowed down Hollywood films, bootleg concerts, medical history recordings and other un-canny film-clips and used found texts since his early performances. Zidane a 21st century portrait (2006), his most recent paradigm of the use of images and ready-made, was a project realized in collaboration with Philip Parreno.

Jonathan Monk (1969, Leicester) has used 50’s and 60’s photographs from an old family album to rewrite, comment on and strip down the conveyed art history. He has also dealt with coincidences and used other found material, and through them, has questioned the process of making art and the perception of it. Monk is not only interested in questioning art itself but also searches his own identity as an artist and as a person. His recent works, like the quotation, appropriation and variation from Boetti, and other artists, make this practice evident.

“Imagination dead imagine. A place that again. Never another question. A place, then someone it, that again.” The context of All Strange Away by S. Beckett (written in 1963, but published only in 1976) could be assumed as the point of departure for this new project. Suggesting ways of rethinking both the traditional role of the artist and the creative process. Like the ideal subtext for this and many other pieces. Again.

The exhibition Leon d’Oro consists in Sublimations of Desire (2008), four different films realized by Jonathan and Douglas a “quattro mani” and presented for the first time in one video installation. In another room a series of intermittent texts, will be part of a new instruction piece.

A secret gastronomic performance will be played for Gordon by Monk. And vice versa. Just for one night, during the evening of the opening, outdoor, in the nearby Piazza Dante. It will evolve around an unexpected idea on food and drinks. It will eventually explode in bright colours inside Fondazione Morra Greco.

“Stool, bare walls when the lights comes on, women’s faces on the walls when the light comes on. In a corner when the light comes on tattered synthaxes of…” Neapolitan food, drinks and language with the same ambiguous and tempting text. Against the unbearable common place of mozzarella and Vesuvio.

“Words – wrote Mallarmé – can and must be self-sufficient. They have their own personal strength, their force, their individuality, their own existence. They have enough strength to oppose to the aggression of ideas.” Further, Degas told confidentially to Ludovic Halévy, which in turn reported it, that in fact that brilliant sentence was his own. Adding though that it did not matter, as it epitomized Mallarme’s theory on the use of words.

Degas and Mallarmé at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The same profound sense of their collaboration and the common theory on words can be found once again in this adventure of ours. Today Monk and Gordon work together like those two friends did. In the same manner. It is the same mental canvas.

All images Courtesy Fondazione Morra Greco, Napoli
© Danilo Donzelli