Simone Zaccagnini
Loafing Around

Language: EN
Book Pages: 112
Dimension: 188 X 247 mm
Edition of 200
Year: 2021

ELISE BY OLSEN'S ESSAY


“I won’t send you two pages about my work, but I’ll send you my playlist and my references. I can’t write about my work, it’s complicated, it will be pretentious. I, as an artist, has a vision about something, and cannot pretend to be someone else, who has a vision about my vision. It’s not the artist’s job to try to analyze the works, it will become vulgar.
 
One can’t be the actor and the critic... You will have to try to contextualize it, make sense of it, put it all together”.
 
These are Simone’s instructions when I speak with him on Whatsapp from his car in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, where he sits when he needs to be alone. Usually, Simone works in a studio space that he shares with his girlfriend Anna. But he had an incident – he broke his sewing machine, which then had to be replaced – and as he bought a new, industrial one, it was, by default, delivered to his home.
 
“So now I had this monster installed at home”, which led to a decision of moving his studio home temporarily. “I actually prefer to work at home, it forces me to be more clean, although my home now is messy, with plastic and gummy and jackets and socks everywhere”.
 
He says he is not romantic per-say with his works, that he is trying to escape an obsession of how to use technique or a language. He doesn’t see art for art, music for music, painting for painting, but a diagonal line between them.
 
“I don’t have any symbolism in my work, that’s for sure; nothing is symbolic.
If people don’t see what it is, I tell them, it is what it is, and it might not be anything. My work should speak on its own; have its own legs, it should be able to walk alone. It has its own life (or its own career, if stuff goes well), its own price, its own house, brother and sisters and owners, and eventually it doesn’t belong to me anymore, it’s not mine.” It’s not the usual approach that art drives you into.
 
“Formally, I’m trying to have precise works, because although I have a punk approach, I don’t like trashy results” he says, and obviously references Jean Dubuffet and Art Brut. “Sometimes beauty and ugliness are so close. Since the renaissance people tried to have an answer for what beauty is, but beauty is a moment, something that shows itself, not something you can manage or reproduce as a medium”. I’m interested in the rather inelegant and sporty element to his work. “I don’t to any sports, I’m too lazy to make sports, I’m keeping skinny by being nervous and smoking cigarettes. Obviously I don’t know thesports world too much.” However he is interested in sports logos and logomania.
 
Riviera Sunset Boulevard is an installation of 10-12 works (uncertain as of this moment). The works escape all borders, forms and shapes. The materials are all chosen carefully and sourced from the Internet; the three identical Kellogg’s jackets were ordered from New Zealand, Italy and the US.
Typically, Simone would use wooden stretchers as canvas, but these have none – they’re made a bit like a soft suitcase; onto red gummy these jackets and jerseys are mounted, with logos in bright palettes (no blacks or browns or dark reds), layered with Fimo clay (typically used by kids or punks), also in intense colors. For this exhibition, Simone has looked to COBRA artists like Karel Appel and Asger Jorn, as well as Tanaka Atsuko from the Gutai collective.
 
Part of the idea of a sculpture is that you’re standing in front of, looking at, a monument. These new works are not monumental like sculptures normally are. They are empty inside, but have a functional structure, which allows them to be put on the couch, put on the wall, slept on. “In a way, I try to keep the functionality away. When I start working on them, they have a function, and after I have worked on them, they have no function. They are stretched until broken, they are cut”.
 
Apropos cut, Simone is majorly influenced by deconstruction and sampling in hiphop; tracks are cut,
manipulated until it hurts something else, if you want. He sent me a playlist of Madlib, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Travis Scott and Dean Blunt. And during the time making this new body of work, an old friend of Simone’s re-appeared in his life, Dre Love, an American rapper and MC, who said of Simone’s new works they have an energy and strong references reminiscing the golden era gladness of the 90s in Jamaica, Queens, where he had grown up. And it’s precisely these nostalgic connotations to and combinations of, hiphop, 90s fashion and childishness that makes these new works so paradoxically refreshing.
 
 
Elise By Olsen

It all starts with the search for a space to bring together artists who are or aren’t acquainted, sometimes following one another, always independent and rather evenhanded. Breaking away from the codes, fears, misrepre- sentations and networks of Art as an Institution’s territories, where sometimes creation won’t forget to pimp itself out or showboat around. A desire to exist with one another and not against one another. To find an un-space, wi- thout any link to the [art] world. Post-insulte will be in the outskirts of town, in Clichy. A space chosen because it imposes itself, is abun- dantly available and is one that we like. On the ground floor, a Leader Price and its dirt-cheap offers. At the corner, the neighbo- rhood off track betting bar with its view on loop of le Rapido lotto draw, and dreams of easy money that never come true, with a table just big enough to place your bets. Upstairs, an empty apartment, cheap hardwoods and glass cei- ling overlooking a halal kebab. A pigeon coop left to its own devices since way back, warped and rusted stained glass win- dowpanes. A dark basement, tiled walls, probably the back room of a butcher shop. A fertile plot of land—like a small island—so that the ensemble of artists may show- case a precarious and ephemeral alternative to the wave of the art world, its name doping/dropping, its numbers and no-go zones.
 
FuBu. The artist often projects themself in their dreams, a mix of pleasure, of play, self-satisfaction, and often frustrations. Imagine the perfect place, a flamboyant floor, a staggering ceiling height, a preoccupying perspective... Forms, paint, sculptures massive or on an intimate scale, pictures, films: Each envisioned scenario reflects the hope of the artist to pass on their ideas, universe, vision.
 
For what purpose and for who to see? as the unique rallying cry, without the need for anyone. Neither patron nor sponsor: For Us By Us, in the era 2017 saturated with images and actors in the know: Curators here, curators there, Instagram artists, Instagram snippets from the show, Instagram li(k)es...
 
To each their own story and their sometimes fictitious flow of ego strokes.
Out of the ordinary. Here, each artist has their own imposing writing, particular gestures, a vocabulary that doesn’t dull out, that doesn’t become its own cliché. A fierce determination to not go on forever in a formula that works. Everyone crossing paths with perseverance, the silhouette of signage, with a presence assumed in their quirks and discoveries.
 
Art is in flotation, that of the tinted and faded Japanese-inspired line of Stéphane Calais, who sees the world as a vast drawing. There’s roaming in the fringes of land and law with Antwan Horfee, whose paintings are blown up with air, bombed out, underground and radically of the people. Art is a dérive with SKKI, lone walker on the watch for the invisible details of the city, its trash, its defects, its rejects that erect a surrealist landscape of the society of consump- tion. Art evokes custom cars and street fashion in the forms and synthetic materials manipulated and distorted by Fréderic Platéus and Simone Zaccagnini.
 
Art takes up volume and plows both intimate and slightly dirty furrows in the work of the indomitable Aline Bouvy, for whom creation is wild. Painting appears to be a printing technique for Mario Picardo, boxer-painter who strikes the canvas with shapes and symbols playing bumper cars, all with the efficiency and rigor of a laborer loading up their truck. The Bells Angels point out again and again that the man who creates today must be able to mutate and offer a range of variations of man to the machine. Art is a failure, a glitch in the works of Alix Desaubliaux, whose searches get lost in virtual geographic intervals disfigured by bugs. The artist is a fictio- nal character with Ken Sortais, who is forever vagabonding between historical remains and contemporary vandalism. Paint spreads out in the spontaneous strokes of Stevie Dix, clearing the boundary between figuration and abstraction in his crusted over color blobs, between the light of color and strong lines. With Jon Pilkington the propositions of composition naturally become evident after multiple superimpositions. Mathias Schweizer splits up landscapes, first scanned then assembled and altered in a random manner, emerging into space like visual pollution. Art is a sometimes-sculptural-second skin with Nicolas Momein, between viscid puddles and exposed hairs: Art is animal.
 
Multi-directional, this project is in its third chapter 1 + 2, multiple curators and sundry participants, sometimes the same, but always new accomplices. Post-insulte proposes a project, that which co- mes after the rejections, after the refusals, after the pre-masticated and post-market, after the déjà-vu and déjà been through. The-after- the-blockbuster-ticket-of-museums-and-galleries-who-hold-the-top- spot. Culture of clicks and of cliques. Post thingamajig and neo-post thingamabob: Having fun with the jargon that hums on. Put into contact in this way, with the poster signed by the graphic designer Kaïs Dhifi and the publication of a catalog, headed by Simon Bernheim and Julien Sirjacq of Bells Angels, the works presented take their stab at affirming art as an insult, profanity, a transgression, backtalk, an attack, defacement, an outburst, a strain, blasphemy: A freedom fix that knows neither good manners nor polite standards.
 
Antwan Horfee & Hugo Vitrani

SCOTT HENRY ELLIOTT'S ESSAY 
 
 
In those days of summer which reached forty degrees and higher, the white cats seemed to be particularly prolific. These scorched ghosts lurked among the streets and I couldn’t but help envision each one as a sort of pure white grim reaper, ready to pounce at any moment.
 
I remember the day we both decided to embark on this draining course of action.
“Do you want a holiday home? Yes or no?”
It was a rather rudimentary question, but the domino effects afterwards were not those I had envisioned. In a haze of sun-bleached perfection, it had all seemed like such a good idea. It was that New York energy again, that one I left behind in the summer of ‘69, I can do anything and I will! Where had this bliss disappeared to? In the ether dissolved their spark, something they both embraced silently.
 
Slow it all down.
Hold your horses.
Steady on there, my friend.
 
Reality had a much slower tempo and it suited them down to a T.
 
You shall make three windows on each wall, light should be a priority. My memory superimposes squares of sensual blues together, set perfectly into the wall. Together we add poetry to stone, the surfaces now mirroring the ripples along your spine.
 
Polished concrete
Stainless steel
How does it feel?
Pay for it later
Put it on credit
Do you accept debit?
 
Its purpose would change, the form remaining close to that which was intended. Neither of them knew how to construct a stable home, a solid capsule to contain them in. It was to become a transformer of sorts, holiday home slash tomb, or perhaps this is the true form, a doubled sided sword, never admitted by those inhabiting the idea. This was how it was to be built. The length should be thirty cubits; it’s breadth ve cubits and its height three cubits. There was to be one dominant window facing the sea, the rest of the building would be encased in concrete. Any wood included in the construction would be cypress wood, a wood perfectly suited to the harsh climate that left them both sitting in grey, saggy denim.
 
 
Scott Henry Elliott