– The grandeur and the fall in the art of Venice
The exhibition The Venice Syndrome – The grandeur and the fall in the art of Venice is a story about Venice’s dramatic history and about the many artists who, since the 19th century, have been portraying this magical city. The exhibition touches upon Venice’s grand architecture, fabulous parties and enigmatic ambiences, while also revealing the less flattering sides of the city through modernism’s and contemporary art’s more ambiguous depictions.
Venice was once the Queen of the Adriatic – powerful, incomparable and extravagant. But in the course of time, Venice’s power and significance have come to be appreciably diluted and today, the place calls an abandoned museum town to mind. It’s almost unreal: like a scene where the architecture is a series of coulisses and where the city’s shopkeepers are actors who are staging nostalgia for tourists. Venice is increasingly becoming the tourists’ place. Cruise ships and art biennials conquer the city – everyone wants to have a bite of Venice – we’re all suffering from “The Venice Syndrome”.
The basis of our perception of Venice can be spotted especially clearly in the eighteenth century’s depictions of the city’s fantastic scenarios of lavishly decorated palaces, gracefully sweeping canals and milky turquoise lagoon water, which provided the occasion for the artists’ large-scale compositions with explosions of color, line and light. Italian masters like Canaletto and Guardi awakened the dream of Venice to life and highlighted the city’s iconic traits of character, such as the gondolas, The Grand Canal, St. Mark’s Square, the Rialto Bridge and the Santa Maria della Salute church. These were depictions of a grandiose city that was just as dynamic as it was decadent, albeit a city that had, at this point in time, already seen its heyday a few hundred years earlier.
Venice was a great inspiration for both the English Romantic artists and the Danish Golden Age painters, who – notwithstanding their different respective figurative idioms – were each trying to push the limits related to the representation of light and color. The Danish Golden Age painters were absorbed in trying to portray that which is especially typical of Venice, namely the aforementioned familiar places and ambiences. However, these artists also moved in closely on the Venetians and sometimes on the less becoming circumstances under which many poorer Italians lived. Already in the work of the Danish Golden Age painters, it becomes clear that when it comes to Venice, there is a backside to the medal. Here, we find well-padded tourists in gondolas and poor beggars who are seeking alms from the wealthy bourgeoisie. The Danish Golden Age painters illustrate a dualism in Venice – on one side, a fascination with the overwhelming beauty, and on the other side, the artificial features and the gnawing sense of coulisse that still impinges when you visit Venice in the present day.
With the advent of modernism, the color palette changes but the fascination with Venice persists. Willumsen’s famous nocturnal pictures disclose a more disquieting aspect than what had previously been experienced in depictions of the city. He seems to have been allured by the dark water and he gets the city to look as if it were hovering over a foundation of black nothingness. In bright colors, the city’s palaces light up as though they were fantasy buildings in a fairy-tale land. This prodigious aspect is also accentuated by Pipilotti Rist who, in a video installation, depicts the iconic places in Venice in such forcible colors that her artwork, in all its exaggerated extravagance, runs tangent to the borderline of both kitsch and cliché.
Several artists have tried to portray Venice’s many moods. The photographer, Viggo Rivad, captures not only the well-known sides of the city, but also the disconcerting ambiences in the small streets and canals and in the very special mist that can settle in over the city. His photographs, by virtue of their aesthetics and their motives, lead the mind toward the horror film, Don’t Look Now, and underscore the city’s more disturbing and forbidding sides. The labyrinthine street layout, wherein one can easily get lost or become surrounded by water, and the shift between overwhelming expanses of plaza area and narrow alleys can settle in as a state of unrest or a sense of being lost, as we witness in Palle Nielsen’s drawings, which depict the solitary person in the big city: or as we see in Sophie Calle’s work, where she pursues – and spies on – a man moving around the labyrinthine city.
Venice has, through the years, been subjected to a great many doomsday prophecies. Like another Atlantis, it has been augured that the city will sink one day, under the threat of pollution and global warming. This merciless prediction contributes to the city’s mystique and to a continued fascination on the part of artists. In both Per Kirkeby’s and Alfredo Jaar’s work, the city sinks. In his piece, Jaar takes his mark in the Venice Biennale – the great stage for contemporary art – and accordingly emphasizes how the city is reduced to being a framework for the showing of art and is no longer a place from where art is emanating.
The exhibition’s earliest works date from the mid-1700s, from the same epoch as when the architect, Lauritz de Thurah, designed and built Gl Holtegaard – one of the Danish baroque’s architectonic masterpieces. The exhibition moves through time, in a relatively chronological fashion, in a sequence that progresses through Gl Holtegaard’s eight exhibition rooms and culminates in a work from 2013. It chiefly shows the work of international luminaries, both Danish and foreign. The exhibition is indicative of an art historical walking tour but focuses – via certain central points of impact – on the development that has unfolded in our perceptions of – and in the representations of – the city of Venice. The exhibition’s subtitle, The grandeur and the fall in the art of Venice, refers to the shift that has taken place in the reproduction of Venice from modernism and henceforth as part of an attempt to call attention to how our relationship to Venice in the present day is characterized by a duality. Venice is not only beauty and turquoise lagoon water but is also a staged, labyrinthine and, in many ways, artificial city. This point is underscored especially clearly at the end of the show in the documentary film, The Venice Syndrome, from 2012 and is unfolded along the way through texts and other visual materials.
In connection with the exhibition, a richly illustrated catalogue will be published, in Danish and English, with introductions to the exhibition’s themes and essays that put the exhibition in perspective. Finally, the exhibition will be enlivened through a series of arrangements and lectures that will, among other things, call into play interpretations of Venice from literature, cinema and the world of music. La mostra è aperta dal 22 agosto al 14 dicembre.