"Cronache"

Francesco Jodice

Galleria Umberto Di Marino

Via Alabardieri 1, 80121 Napoli, Italy
Tel.+39 081 0609318 Fax +39 081 2142623 mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
10 December 2015>22 January 2016

As part of the ten more ten series of events being held to mark the twentieth anniversary of the gallery, the Galleria Umberto Di Marino is delighted to present the new solo show of Francesco Jodice’s work entitled Cronache (Stories) on Thursday 10 December 2015.
Right from his very first exhibition held on our premises in Naples in 2006, the artist’s work has enriched the gallery’s programme aimed at analysing contemporary stances on the dynamics of the geopolitical transformation of districts by following a complex, multidisciplinary perspective.
Using a perspective based on anthropology and town planning, the study is closely intertwined with an approach aimed at creating "art as civic poetics" in which the artist’s work is immersed as far as possible in the subject of the research. To mark the occasion, a corpus of works will be presented that represent the artist’s projects undertaken over the last few years as part of an approach that lets viewers find their own way of interpreting an intimate and intermittent archive of data, references, narratives and traces of memory. The visitor is therefore encouraged to inhabit, both mentally and physically, the time between the embryonic phase of research and the final phase of the exhibition during the lengthy period of formulation that accompanies each project.
The chaos of notes is channelled by Francesco Jodice’s gaze into a nucleus that remains open to something fragmentary, unfinished and even contradictory until aesthetic criteria prevail to bring coherence to everything. It is a “demolecularised” reality in which everyone, fairly consciously, becomes the inner workings that help to conclude the process.
At the end of the world (2011) encapsulates within a metaphor the pervasive predominance of a system of thought that manages to hold hostage the huge, awkward and cumbersome western world which seems incapable of moving in other directions.
The liquidity that overturns the traditionally holistic force of the view of the stacks of the Faraglioni at Capri, in The Diefenbach Chronicles (2013), represents the synthesis of a painstaking analysis of the influence of the artist’s own geopolitical position on artistic practice since it bears witness to a Europe in flames. Like Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, the pioneer of nudism and a social reformer who lived in the period between the collapse of the great nineteenth century empires and the First World War, Jodice gives the landscape a primordial energy that guards the violent impulses of post-western culture under ashes.
Historical distance forces us to use greater lucidity in re-interpreting the efforts made to construct a powerful narrative of national identity by, for example, the US government when it commissioned John Ford to make a series of westerns in the early twentieth century. Several fragments are trapped within the satellite images taken from Google Earth, focusing on several of the places which have most significance in the light of recent political events. The series Primo lavoro (First work) (2014) portrays the cemetery of military aeroplanes in Tucson. Like a gigantic stela, it succinctly illustrates all the failures of cultural coercion which have never been effectively overcome by the capitalist society of the time and contemporary post-capitalist society.
Francesco Jodice was born in Napoli, Italy in 1967. He lives and works in Milan.
Selected solo and group exhibitions
2015
American Recordings, curated by Massimo Melotti, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Torino, I Weird Tales, curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venezia, I Proportio, Palazzo Fortuny, Venezia, I
2014
Ritratto dell’artista da giovane, Castello di Rivoli, Torino, I
2013
Francesco Jodice, curated by Gigliola Foschi, Podbielski Contemporary, Berlin, D
2011
Spectaculum Spectatoris, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, E Citytellers, Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid, E La collezione attiva. Opere mediali da Vito Acconci a Simon Starling, MUSEION, Bolzano La memoria del otro en la era de lo global, curated by Anna Maria Guasch, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, La Habana
2010
so far, so long, Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Napoli, I Citytellers_Sao Paulo_Aral_Dubai, Museo MADRE, Napoli, I Citytellers_Sao Paulo_Aral_Dubai, MAMbo, Bologna, I
2009
I can see your house from here, curated by Annelie Bortolotti, Letizia Ragaglia, MUSEION at the EURAC tower, Bolzano, I Da Guarene all'Etna ‘09, curated by Filippo Maggia, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Guarene d'Alba, (CN), I
2008
Francesco Jodice, GAM Torino, I The Morocco Affair, Black Box, ARGOS Centre for art and medias, Brussels, B L’alba di Domani: Arte Contemporanea in Italia da Collezioni Italiane, curated by Vittorio Urbani, Proje 4L/Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul, TR
2007
Global cities, Screening of the video São Paulo_Citytellers, Tate Modern, Londra Cine y casi cine, Program 3, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, E
2006
How to live together, XXVII Biennale di São Paulo, BR Agent provocateur, Galleria Umberto di Marino, Napoli
2004
Natura, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, Liverpool, GB 2003 The 50th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia (Multiplicity) 2002 DOCUMENTA 11, Kassel, D (Multiplicity)