Jannis Kounellis

A (temporary) leave of many friends who are my truest world, with the attempt of getting them together in an ideal summary conceived to support me during my being far away. –A. L.

Atto unico di Jannis Kounellis

Performances by artists in 1968 Rome: Cesare Tacchi, Eliseo Mattiacci, Jannis Kounellis, Aldo Mondino and Nanni Cagnone redefine the boundaries of contemporary art by playing with heterogeneous materials, aluminum wheels, fish, kites, paper planes. The group from via Brunetti performs in piazza del Popolo, reviving the city traffic with by now bizarre means of transport, the velocipede and the tractor, on which, with an Indian scalp on his head, Gino De Dominicis whizzes by, immortalized by the camera before the cult of immortality delivered him to the logic of disappearance.

The only video work Kounellis has ever made: His vision, in the small exhibition itinerary, takes place beyond a black curtain, in a small room created inside the exhibition space for visitors to enter one at a time. It is alone that one goes to interrogate the oracle. From a monitor, placed higher than usual, the mask of Apollo appears in its unshakeable immobility. Kounellis holds it in his right hand, while in his left he holds a lit oil lamp. There is the measurable time of the video, the 25 minutes of its physical duration: The historical time exists in which the artist offered himself to the fixed shot of the camera. Lastly, there is perennial time, the incorrupt cycle of the ancient Divinity who has always presided over the manifestation of light and art and of which Kounellis is but one of the infinite epiphanies.

An “ironic visual reportage” of four artist projects at the L’Attico gallery in Rome, 1968. Patella infuses the work of the artists from the arte povera movement with touches of surrealism, as tinted monochromatic footage of these exhibitions/actions lends them a silent film aesthetic. The title refers to the last names of the main players: gallery owner Fabio Sargentini and artists Jannis Kounellis, Eliseo Mattiacci, Pino Pascali and Luca Maria Patella himself. Kounellis is shown using the gallery as a studio, dying bits of cloth among live animals; Mattiacci engages passerby in a happening on the city streets; Patella and Rosa Foschi are shown in a similar scenario to Terra Animata, with a flag performance in a landscape; and Pascali executes a bizarre ritual on the beach, covered to his neck in sand and later planting whole loaves of bread.