The artistic duo reinterprets the Baroque still life genre to reflect on the present. Among flowers, animals and historical motifs, the artists construct a refuge where artifice, memory and desire coexist.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a text by Leandro Martínez Depietri.
OPENING
Wednesday 10/09, 6pm
Refuge
Chiacho & Giannone
Baroque reflections to read at home on still lifes, eternal spring and ecological collapse, by Leandro Martínez Depietri.
Nature will be reduced to a vase, Chiachio & Giannone declared in 2018 as a diagnosis for our socio-economic system. They then imagined porcelain as the ultimate refuge for all flora and fauna, the world enclosed in a walnut. They were right. What does a vase do but treasure beauty after death? And for such a contemporary issue as ecological collapse, true to their sensibility as old-fashioned queers, they chose the still lifes of the Flemish and Dutch Baroque. They imitated Jan Brueghel the Elder, Ambrosius Bosschaert and Jan Davidsz de Heem, among others.
Painted flowers are more interesting than they seem. They proliferated with the economic expansion of the Netherlands in the 17th century. At the expense of its colonies in the West and East Indies, the Amsterdam stock exchange and banks, the slave trade and the quasi-monopoly of European maritime trade, this region accumulated fabulous wealth. Without a courtly tradition like Versailles or municipal luxury like in Italy, and having expelled the Catholic Church, these iconoclastic Protestants needed cultural traditions to squander their wealth. Their proto-industrial economy had, until then, been governed by the countryside and the cycles of nature, alternating between periods of abundance and scarcity. The domestic space was the preferred channel for squandering the prosperity that had been achieved. Still lifes served as a showcase for domestic luxury, incorporating products from different corners of the commercial empire. In Middelburg, where painted flowers were a speciality, these paintings could fetch extremely high prices. The curiosities depicted and the enormous amount of work involved in producing them were highly valued. Why?
Unlike Pompeian murals, which depicted olive trees in gardens and surrounding fields, flower paintings were the product of colonial fantasy. They brought together species from different parts of the world and always, without exception, at their peak of bloom, even though this naturally occurred at different times of the year. To achieve this, each artist had to make preliminary studies of the flowers when they bloomed. They visited the botanical gardens of Dutch cities to study exotic species and consulted with experts to sketch them at the right moment. They collected sketched flowers and then assembled them into a perfect bouquet that existed only in their imagination. These arrangements were also always abundant. There was no longer any scarcity. We can say that they are anti-pastoral works because they celebrate the fruits of commerce rather than the generosity of nature. The simultaneous perfection of so many different flowers blurs the notion of agricultural time and breaks the relationship between man and the cycles of nature, glorifying colonial abundance and pictorial work. Merchant collectors celebrated this, approaching with special lenses to appreciate the variations in colour and shape among the petals and insects camouflaged in these eternal springtime vases. [1]
Unlike Pompeian murals, which depicted olive trees in gardens and surrounding fields, flower paintings were the product of colonial fantasy. They brought together species from different parts of the world and always, without exception, at their peak of bloom, even though this naturally occurred at different times of the year. To achieve this, each artist
I return to our unstable present. In their versions, Chiachio & Giannone replace oil paint with gouache. They leave behind the illusion of reality, making the artifice and the copy evident. With these opaque pigments, the brightness of the flowers is suggested and the colour gradients become schematic. They study and imitate Baroque painting, not flowers. They construct image upon image, but unlike artificial intelligence, the workmanship highlights the meticulous work required to bring the scene to life. Their fauna does not consist of chameleon-like creatures; they are animals out of scale and out of place, like rabbits coming out of a galley. We could talk about the return of history as farce, but there is more. Isn’t ecological collapse the hidden face of eternal spring? The result of believing in infinite growth on a finite planet? Underneath the perfume lie sweat and blood.
Chiachio & Giannone’s still lifes confront us, no longer with imperial abundance, but with its unfulfilled and now blurred promise. We can smile in the face of catastrophe. We are like the stunned monkeys in their painting, perhaps lost in the image. What remains are illusions, turned into romantic encounters. We cannot help but appreciate the flowers; they are an offering of love.
Always attentive, in their feasts of colour, Chiachio & Giannone traffic in a gesture against colonial fantasy. In the latest paintings in this series, they resort to their practice of radical juxtaposition and incorporate, among leaves and petals, ceramics and Comechingones motifs. It is a tribute to Leo’s family that expands the contemporary trousseau. At the same time, they delve into another aspect of still lifes: how to unaccustom the gaze? How can we break the utilitarian perception of the world? Once again, they insist on the neglected part of our territorial and historical reality. It turns out that our tables have their legs in Abya Yala and that flowers and fruits are always far away, no matter how much Buenos Aires wants to dream of a Parisian mirage, or today, a replica of Miami in the suburbs. Rosa Rolanda, in an untitled and undated painting, had already ventured into this territory, using an Aztec effigy as the backdrop for a baroque floral arrangement set against a metaphysical landscape. What for Rolanda was a materialisation of Mexico’s revolutionary reality, in Chiachio & Giannone it is a manifestation of what is repressed in the Buenos Aires unconscious.
I cannot conclude without stating the obvious: this duo finds refuge in drawing and painting for their intense embroidery practice and, even more so, in still life, which radically eliminates the human figure. The genre serves as an escape, a respite from their obsession with self-portraiture. And yet, they incorporated their preparatory drawings into this exhibition, emphasising their dual and indelible presence as architects of these aesthetic games. Who could blame them? There is no artist without obsession.
[1] For those who would like to know more about Dutch Baroque flowers, I recommend reading Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. (Harvard University Press, 1990), 96-135. On the Dutch economy of the 1600s, moral problems and the culture of spending, read Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1988).
