The seminal meeting in which Carol Bove kissed master Carlo Scarpa

Half based on isolation, both temporal and spatial, of certain poetic objects such as books, shells, drift woods or peacock feathers, and the other half on isolation of pure forms and materials, the art practice of Carol Bove (1971, Geneva, living in New York) can be easily explained as an ongoing and ordered effort to set relations between what has been isolated and the space around it. In the case of her current exhibition at Museion (Bozen, Italy) this sort of relational space has been filled with the presence of an unconventional architect like Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978), who clearly shares with Bove – and with Haris Hepaminonda too, as proved by her recent exhibition at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice – a sensitivity for composition of lines, volumes and colours evoking order, symbolism and geometry.

 

Two exhibition’s cabinets and an easel on loan from the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona and from the Gipsoteca Canoviana in Possagno, and three sculptural objects from the Museo delle Rarità Carlo Scarpa at the Monselice Castle – that is known for being the only architecture by Andrea Palladio still in private hands – have been put on display along with nine main sculptures by Bove, covering a time frame from 2004 to 2014. But hardly any understanding of how the voices of these two artistic personalities are similar will come as simple as after having read the below passage taken from a lecture Scarpa gave at the Iuav in Venice on 18 March 1964.

 

The lecture was titled “Arredare”, that means to furnish in English, and questioned the problem of decoration from a point of view that seems exactly the same Bove’s isolation of objects and forms stems from.

 

The “natural facts” Scarpa writes about, which we are only able to understand thanks to the “modern art” appear to be exactly the kind of objects and elements that Bove is interested in isolating and indeed presenting as poetical elements. On the other hand, Scarpa’s approach to the sculptural side of architecture ends up to be revealed in its importance by the fact that Bove – a generation after Scarpa, and after another seminal Italian artist such as Fausto Melotti – is still walking this very same path.

 

Hence, in order to achieve something one needs to invent some relationships. Someone could argue: “Don’t you see that decoration is not involved in the end?”. Yet, I would tell you that there will be a moment when you ought to imagine the chromatism of things – you might as well build a floor, a ceiling, some walls: do you want them all white? Even in the planning of a simple cubic space some little reasoning is involved, an alphabet, perhaps some grammar too. It is indeed a curious discretion which allows us to grasp that a specific dimensional fact, a thickness for instance, is a distinguished quality of the physical value of objects. Modern art enabled us to look though new eyes at certain phenomenon of the matter and allowed us to discover extremely important natural facts. We can finally admire the bark and the trees freely, no longer limited by the eloquence of tradition. As men of our time we have redeemed many things both morally and socially. However, as architects we haven’t yet redeemed the form of the humble and simple things.

January 14, 2015