Ghenos Eros Thanathos (or as Alberto Boatto called it, GET) can still be seen as one of the most radical, seminal artistic projects since World War II, in Italy and beyond. Forty-three years later, it has lost none of its luster, and if anything has taken on new shades of depth. This is what moved Paolo Chiasera, the gallery, and me to work with Boatto’s idea: GET cannot be reduced to its historical importance at the time it was made, since there is nothing dated about it. Over the years, the revolutionary significance of this exhibition and the text that accompanied it has only increased, even today standing as a “dark gem,” an “unfathomable edifice” that is profound, troubling, and impossible to observe at length. Not coincidentally, Boatto built his show around the three basic elements in human life: birth, eros, and death, which serve as the foundation for everything else, with Thanatos as the cornerstone of his discourse. The 1970s were years of radical faith in abstruse ideologies, dangerously detached from reality. Choosing to do such an apolitical exhibition (in the ordinary sense of “politics”) could not have been easy, and I can imagine the criticism it must have sparked. Today, we are living in a time of verbose, self-serving nihilism that overflows into the art world, but the end result is still the same: exhibitions, biennials, and artists that all too often deal with themes divorced from the real world, from the tangible things that directly influence our lives, our bodies, the concrete nature of existence and its key events. We are up to our knees in treatises on post-Fordism, post-colonialism, ’60s design, ’30s modernism, social and anthropological microstudies; yet we have the nerve to complain about art having such a slim audience compared to other creative languages. So today it is perhaps even more revolutionary to focus on these three basic impulses around which our lives truly revolve, compared to which everything else becomes ancillary. Alberto Boatto passed away not long ago, leaving one final piece of writing that guides this project like a lodestar. Along with this text and the book published in 1974, the exhibition he made is the basis from which we started out; as if magically channeling its vision and restoring it to life, Paolo will bring it back in the form of a major installation that will become a curatorial and visual framework for all the other works on view. These are by artists of later generations who share in the spirit of the 1974 exhibition and forge a dialogue with the pieces that were originally shown, regenerating them, subverting them, and proving that for art there is always a new life after death.
Antonio Grulli

Opening : FRIDAY , MARCH 24, 2017 – 6:00 PM

Category: ITALY press release

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