Galleria Federico Vavassori | Do I still have to sleep in the closet?

Riccardo Paratore
Do I still have to sleep in the closet?
October 27 - November 25, 2017

Riccardo Paratore, Do I still have to sleep in the closet?, 2017, installation view, Galleria Federico Vavassori, Milan

RICCARDO PARATORE

DO I STILL HAVE TO SLEEP IN THE CLOSET?

October 27 - November 25, 2017

Galleria Federico Vavassori is proud to present a new exhibition by Riccardo Paratore, his second with the gallery.

The exhibition showcases the gallery space as the personal home of Federico Vavassori, who does in fact live in the gallery.

Relics of Italian heritage as well as those personal to his dealer, make up Paratore’s new temporary furnishings for the gallerist’s home, and betray a shared taste for cultural incongruence: high and low, classic European and flotsam of global capitalism. Beyond good and bad. Youth.

Fragments of hentai manga culture are translated onto canvases by the hands of Florentine artisans (or skilled hacks, who usually oil renaissance knockoffs), ostensibly an overkill as the artist intends for them to be as if painted by the gallerist himself. These paintings depict displaced pages that are notably softcore for hentai. Many of their protagonists are from Dragon Ball Z, a global smash hit whose androids and weregorilla-aliens are evolved versions of the characters in Journey to the West, a Chinese classic published in the 16th century about a legendary pilgrimage (trivial information for the nascent gallerist who peddled hentai manga in school only for their erotic value). The floor, lined with rubber sheets, is riddled with raised dots to be littered and trod upon, once manufactured by the Milan-based multinational Pirelli. A folding bed, which looks ridiculous, juts out from a spillage of debris and mementos of hopes and disappointments that rarely see the light of day.

On a spring day, in the bustle of Duomo di Milano, he stands, with a freshly emptied McDonald’s cup in hand, and beholds you. His name is Federico Vavassori. ‘For every sale from this show,’ he says, ‘I will play for you with my own fingers Schumann’s Kinderszenen’.

Such an inventory of works, however, evinces that the artist helplessly acknowledges the true face of consummation, which is all but transactional.