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On Saturday 12th the PAC remains open from 18pm to midnight with free admission, with performances by Cesare Viel from 24pm to 18.30pm. Sunday 21.30th in Baggio at 13pm "Circular" performance by the artist Eva Marisaldi with Cesare Viel and 17.30 other artists

Milan, October 11 2019 - The PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea in Milan presents "More nobody anywhere", Cesare Viel's largest solo exhibition in a public space, which traces the work and performance practice of the Italian artist.

Promoted by the Municipality of Milan | Culture and produced by PAC with Silvana Editoriale, the exhibition is curated by Diego Sileo and will be inaugurated on Saturday 12 October on the occasion of the fifteenth Contemporary Art Day organized by AMACI - Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums - of which PAC is a founding member. For the inauguration of the exhibition the PAC will remain open from 18pm to midnight with free admission. From 24pm to 18.30pm, Cesare Viel will be the protagonist with a new performance and the reactivation of some of his previous actions.

“After Luca Vitone and Eva Marisaldi, the PAC continues to explore contemporary Italian creativity by delving into the work of the circle of artists born in the 1960s and bringing visitors into contact with the sensitive poetics of Cesare Viel - declares the Councilor for Culture Filippo Del Corno -. A new opportunity to understand how the term 'conceptual' actually encompasses a universe of expressive tensions that find, thanks to the research work of each artist, always different ways to manifest themselves."

The protagonists of Viel's works are words and the body, accompanied by different expressive means, including prose, performance, video, photography and drawings, which often intertwine relationships with poets and narrators such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Cesare Pavese , Gertrude Stein, Dino Campana, Paul Auster and many others.

In his artistic research, the emotional involvement between the narrator and the observer takes on particular importance, through a path made of thoughts and stories. Since the early nineties, performances, disguises, transformations, make-up, plays or songs have represented for Viel a process of transmitting himself to others. Delving into other bodies and other stories, the artist imagines other forms of subjectivity that interpret art as a moment of emotional exchange and relationship with the community.

Themes such as memory and remembrance, the feminine, the word, the body, the definition of oneself and the other and the search for new forms of identity often recur in the artist's work. The message that Viel finds in them, however, is not linked to a mere intellectual journey, but rather oriented towards the search for awareness.

THE MOSTRA

On display at the PAC are a selection of past and recent works, the revival of some previous performances by the same artist and other performers and the new performance installation “My father's garden. The buried objects” (2019), dedicated to his father and his passing, which will see Viel as the protagonist on the opening evening.

The link with the past also emerges in “Lost in Meditation” (1999), an imposing installation that will open the exhibition as a reference to the artist's childhood spent in Veneto, when the farmers cut the grass, collected the hay and arranged it. in heaps on the meadows. An investigation into language in art, but also a social theme in a country like ours which until a few decades ago was still mostly an agricultural reality.

The title of the exhibition itself is a quote from Roland Barthes present in the work "Universal Floods" (2010), dedicated to mourning the loss of the mother: a large drawing printed on non-woven fabric, taken from a photo that appeared in a newspaper in which an Indian woman is immersed in a vortex of water caused by a flood in 2009. The handwritten phrase and the drawing go beyond the news and lead us to reflect, starting from our personal experiences, on the often complex relationship with reality.

In Viel's works we often find images extrapolated from the news - redesigned, commented or transmitted in the form of performances - in which the artist gets involved, exploring and altering his own and others' identities, often arriving at defining a mixed identity, androgynous, mimetic.

In 2004 during the performance "To the Lighthouse" (also staged in 2005 at the PAC) Viel took on the role of Virginia Woolf, the English writer who developed the theme of androgyny in "Orlando". Not a total disguise, but a half one: wig and face made up, silk blouse with velvet ribbon and dark jacket. For the rest, men's shoes and trousers. The artist, sitting in a 2003s living room, listens to the reading of a chapter of Woolf's novel (in Italian “Gita al faro”). In “Light a Lamp and Disappear” (XNUMX) the dialogue is with the American poet Emily Dickinson: a letter addressed to her written by Viel and read aloud in front of the audience. At the end of the performance, the letter remains on a white carpet-sheet and a lit lamp. Dickinson said that poets light lamps whose sparks overcome space-time distances and white was her color; at a certain point in her life, in fact, she decided to dress only in white.

In “Seasonal Affective Disorder” (1998), Viel alternates words with pauses for reflection and sudden gestures that reveal an unstable psychological and emotional condition. The title refers to a depressive syndrome that affects Scandinavian people in the part of the year when darkness prevails. The artist enters the scene, sits down, puts on makeup, writes, moves papers on a table, and looks in the mirror. The multiple aspects of the artist's personality resurface in the exploration of the body and its limits, in existential discomfort, together with the desire to show oneself without disguise before the eye of the video camera.

“Progetto Bachmann” reports the trace of the performance carried out in 2006 in a private apartment in Via Giulia in Rome, close to the home of the Austrian writer who tragically passed away in 1973. This work also addresses the intertwining of text, voice, body, identity, male size and female size.

In 2000 Viel closed himself in a cage for the performance “Aladdin was captured”: a wooden cage, the kind used to transport goods. The artist remains seated on a carpet for a few hours reading tarot cards and writing sentences that the public communicates to him on various colored sheets of paper left haphazardly on the carpet. The fairy-tale subject is a pretext for an ironic representation on the frustrating influence of conventions and on the fundamental themes of freedom and imprisonment.

Specifically for the exhibition at the PAC, Viel created a second new work entitled “In the heart of the relationship” (2019): a sound installation on the discreet and intimate revolutionary force of the love relationship. His voice and that of his life partner, Laura Guglielmi, intertwine in an intense and poetic "love speech" composed and written by both. A fundamental work for the contemporaneity in which we live, because having a system, having a language to talk about love is necessary for love to be a source of energy and inspiration for everyone and because - as Barthes stated - "modern society lacks of a language to express love”.

The catalogue, published by Silvana Editoriale, will tell the entire artistic journey of Viel through a rich iconographic apparatus, new texts by the curator, by Francesco Bernardelli, Emanuela De Cecco, Francesca Guerisoli, Laura Guglielmi, Antonio Leone and by Cesare Viel himself, as well as to the subjects' complete transcripts of his most representative performative actions.

Accompanying the public among the works is a free guide to the exhibition edited by Paola Valenti, professor of History of Contemporary Art at the University of Genoa.

The exhibition is organized with the support of TOD'S, sponsor of the PAC's exhibition activity, with the contribution of Alcantara, Cairo Editore and Kartell and with the support of Vulcano.

THE PERFORMANCES

For the inauguration at 18.30 pm Cesare Viel will create the new performance “My father's garden. The buried objects ”(2019), dedicated to the father and his passing.

From 19pm to 30pm there will be the reactivation of some previous actions by the same artist and other performers: “Lost in Meditation”, “Infinite recomposition” and “Aladdin was captured”.

THE PUBLIC PROGRAM

To enrich the visitor experience, the PAC has involved musicians, performers, DJs, journalists, actors and directors who will dialogue with the works of the exhibition, also in synergy with the widespread event platforms that enliven Milan in autumn:

- Saturday 26 October at 18pm Danae Festival in collaboration with PAC brings on display a performance by Jacopo Jenna between street dance and contemporary dance with music by Caterina Barbieri;

- Tuesday 5 November at 21pm the PAC opens the exhibition rooms at JAZZMI with “Insight”, the project by Francesco Chiapperini soprano & bass clarinet with Simone Lobina, electric guitar & FX and Simone Quatrana, piano & synth;

- Saturday 9 November at 17pm appointment with the Elfo Puccini Theater which brings to the PAC some fragments of the show "Angels in America" ​​by Ferdinando Bruni and Elio De Capitani to create a dialogue with the works of the artist Cesare Viel on the themes of identity and gender ;

- the PAC also participates in Bookcity with three events: on November 14th at 19pm the presentation of the book “Fabio Mauri. Writings on display” with Francesca Alfano Miglietti, Andrea Viliani and Lea Vergine; on 15, 16 and 17 November two workshops curated by Claudio Cantelmi, Studio Fabio Mauri;

- Tuesday 19 November at 21pm Arisa, one of the most intense and original interpreters of Italian song, will be the protagonist of an unprecedented live piano and voice performance among the works of Cesare Viel on the occasion of Milan Music Week;

- Thursday 21 November at 19pm second appointment as part of Milan Music Week: an unusual guided tour of art and music at Cesare Viel's exhibition, with the curator Diego Sileo and the participation of Carlo Antonelli. Following (20pm) a DJ set by Missin Red will spread the sounds born from the encounter with the works of the exhibition in the PAC.

Cesare Viel will also be a guest at PAC in two events:

- Tuesday 22 October at 19pm a talk with Paola Mieli, Massimo Prearo and Diego Sileo will connect the texts of Mario Mieli and the works of Cesare Viel on the themes of identity and gender;

- Tuesday 12 November at 19pm Cesare Viel presents, together with the director

Gianfranco Barberi, the film “Hotel Roma”, on the story of one of his lectureperformances dedicated to Cesare Pavese.

THE PAC PROJECT ROOM

This year too, as per tradition, AMACI has entrusted an artist with the creation of the guiding image of the fifteenth Contemporary Day: for 2019 the associated museums have chosen Eva Marisaldi (Bologna, 1966) who, in addition to having created the image of the event, will be the protagonist of a personal exhibition spread throughout the national territory.

The AMACI museums will in fact host simultaneously and for one day a selection of Eva Marisaldi's works, offering the general public the opportunity to learn about and deepen her research.

In particular, the PAC will exhibit the installation " Dopolavoro " (10) and the video " Circolare " (2013-2009) until November 2019th in the Project Room on the first floor.

On Sunday 13 October at 17.30 pm the PAC will also bring the "Circular" performance by the artist Eva Marisaldi to the Baggio district of Milan, which will involve 13 artists, including Cesare Viel, on the bumper car track of the historic annual Milanese festival.

An opportunity to revisit Marisaldi's works after the solo show that saw her as the protagonist at the PAC in the autumn of 2018.

Info and timetables on www.pacmilano.it