Mind Games and Weatherly Declarations: Tolone at Frutta Gallery

Come Quando Fuori Piove, 2015, Installation Views, Courtesy of Frutta, Photo Credit: Roberto Apa.

Walk down the stairs. Turn left. A waiting room. Maybe I should wait. Maybe I should pass through. It is dark beyond. An iMac is projecting a red light on the white wall, looping an odd video of some red tapestry. The next room looks more like an art gallery, excepting those curtains moving back and forth. Each move hides an artwork and reveals another.

Santo Tolone’s first solo show at Frutta Gallery, "Come Quando Fuori Piove" (17 September - 13 November) and is a summa of his practice and insights (press release). Friendly attempting to trick the viewer’s mind, the exhibition is a game, playing on meaning, details, perception, the conscious, and the unconscious. But the game cannot be won, only revealed.

Come Quando Fuori Piove, 2015, Installation Views, Courtesy of Frutta, Photo Credit: Roberto Apa.

Permeated by a sense of duality, the exhibition path may be seen as a walk into the artist’s mind, in which specific images and perceptions go from a conscious to an unconscious level. The conscious part appears first, plain, and apparently calm, resembling the waiting room of a dentist’s studio with flat white ceilings, piles of magazines, and colorful fish in an aquarium. Then, some of those same elements are abstracted and exaggerated by the unconscious side; the sterile, simple ceiling of the waiting room, for example, has been metabolized and reinterpreted, playing on over-hued colors and complex shapes.

Santo Tolone stimulates the viewer’s mind to play the game; however, since there is not a universal answer to the question Tolone is posing, but many, personal ones, the game cannot be won and stays unraveled. In this open-spaced labyrinth, one may either get lost or go with the flow of the crazy theater. The objects on show lend themselves to different interpretations just as the acronym CQFP may be read as both “cuori, quadri, fiori, picche” and “come quando fuori piove.”

#diSabatino #present #contemporaryart #SandroTolone #Fruttagallery #exhibitions #Rome