Patrizia Biondi ‘Language Can Make Pure Wind Look Solid’ online exhibition
Patrizia Biondi No User Serviceable Parts Inside 2020, Cardboard and paint, Triptych: 86 x 31 x 12cm, 115 x 71 x 15cm, 86 x 26 x 10cm
Artereal Gallery is proud to present a consciously and thoughtfully constructed new body of work by Sydney-based artist Patrizia Biondi – born of a unique moment in global history.
Created during a time of unprecedented turmoil, fear and upheaval, Biondi’s work prompts us to pause and reflect on the systems and structures which we knowingly or unknowingly operate within.
Built out of salvaged cardboard, Biondi’s intricate, quasi-architectural paintings, are an alchemical amalgamation of materials discarded as useless. Transmuting them into bold and striking artworks which rethink, reshape and revision our understanding around how we attribute and determine value, Biondi’s artworks are at once poignant and political, raw and poetic.
“Given the current state of global politics, I saw fit to devote this upcoming exhibition to writer George Orwell, whose oeuvre often foreshadowed some of the peculiar types of governance that are increasingly manifesting worldwide at this very moment. Orwell maintained that language can be employed to manipulate the way in which people think, transforming the unpalatable into the desirable.”
My work deals with unsustainable consumer practises, and we also consume language. Mass media posits language as an item of consumption, colouring our viewing filters, shaping our perception of reality. Words read, avidly consumed, are the seeds that shape our thinking – they sprout, grow and spread as we share them with others. This ebb and flow of words produces our cultural code, our ethos.
Culture, then, is also our incessant, tireless, indefatigable, unsustainable urge for consumption. As we dash to the shops to devour the retail spectacle, we lapse into a void, oblivious that, to produce all that goodness, we are killing our soils, our seas, our rocks, our earth and, in the process, our future.
Yet, the hand that holds the pen convinces us the economy must grow and keep growing. And so, it goes, we must consume and keep consuming.
According to Orwell, language can make pure wind look solid. Thus, language has it that happiness is a trip to the shopping centre.” – Patrizia Biondi (Artist Statement, 2020)
Patrizia Biondi
‘Language Can Make Pure Wind Look Solid’
27 May – 10 June 2020
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