Alice Traforti178 galleries from 28 countries with more than 1000 works on display are the mind-boggling numbers of this twenty-eighth edition of miart, entitled No Time No Space, in homage to Franco Battiato.
In fact, the fair experience sucks you into a dimension in which it is possible to lose track of space and time, surrounded on all sides by futuristic rather than decidedly traditionalist works and more or less poetic visions, anchored in an era in which everything is already seen and done.
Visiting a fair without getting too lost has therefore become essential, and one way to do this is to know what each fair has to offer.
So what does miart offer us?
Thanks to the international presence in Milan, miart represents above all a window on what is happening in the market out there, well beyond the Mediterranean, and a cross-section of what we from the peninsula want to show to the world.
As far as I’m concerned, the goal is always to bring home new insights compared to the research already observed at the other artfairs I attend.
Today we therefore meet an artist who struck me at first sight for his research, technical and aesthetic reasons, and for some shared premises that I realized only later, once I had recovered from the fair hangover, but which my instinct had not let slip.
GAEP Gallery (Bucharest, Romania) tells us about the French artist THÉO MASSOULIER.
installation views: Gaep booth at miart 2024 | ph. Sebastiano Luciano
@ GAEP Gallery, Bucharest (Romania)
Why did you choose to present THÉO MASSOULIER at miart 2024?
Andrei Breahnă, co-founder Gaep: Théo Massoulier’s work engages with some of the most fascinating questions of the present day:
How will the future be, if technology becomes embedded in our bodies, not just our lives, and if it ceases to be a tool under our control?
How far will we go in the manipulation of living matter?
Will our acceptance of transience change in any way when confronted with an increasingly precarious environment?
What about our relation to alterity and the uncanny?
Both eye-catching and thought-provoking, his sculptures, assemblages and bas-relief paintings are informed by a wide range of references, from biology, genetic engineering and philosophy to biopunk, simulation games and Neo-Geo art.
He is particularly influenced by the Japanese “soft power” (manga, anime, films) he consumed as a French teenager in the late 1990s and by the time he later spent traveling and working in Japan.
Many visitors to out booth at miart recognized the aesthetics of ikebana and the sensibility of wabi-sabi in Théo’s series of sculptures titled 5G, and made a connection between kaiju and his zoomorphic assemblages from the series CriSpr.
The presentation revolved around new works from these two ongoing series, that look like jewel-coloured micro-landscapes (the 5G series) and sci-fi creatures (the CriSpr series), bringing to mind, perhaps, a future of hybridization, in which different forms of living and non-living matter co-exist in a single entity.
In his practice, Théo acts like a meticulous bricoleur who synthesizes minerals and plants with artefacts or scraps of human technē.
Despite their diverse materiality, the works boast a rigorous conceptual construction, as they examine the merging between biology and technology, questions of mutation and metamorphosis, and the increasingly hazy taxonomic distinctions between natural and synthetic.
We felt the audience at miart would appreciate all these layers.
– www.gaepgallery.com
– instagram: @theomassoulier
Théo Massoulier: CriSpr.2024.II, 2024 – mixed media, 33 x 25 x 45 cm | courtesy of the artist and Gaep | ph. Sebastiano Luciano
Théo Massoulier: 5G.2024.XII, 2024 – mixed media, 15 x 10 x 20 cm | courtesy of the artist and Gaep | ph. Sebastiano Luciano
Théo Massoulier: 5G.2024.XV, 2024 – mixed media, 15 x 10 x 20 cm | courtesy of the artist and Gaep | ph. Sebastiano Luciano
Alessandra Alliata Nobili
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