Reality, what reality?

Onishi Gallery is pleased to announce “Reality, What Reality?” a group exhibition
curated by Stefania Carrozzini.
A group of selected artists, mostly from Italy, has been asked to represent an individual
sense of reality. With an increasing of a great influx and mass communication
overwhelmed stimuli we are obliged to swim in a precarious and fluid flood, liquid and
continually changing with no single real referent point.

“In the age of technology and data communication the world is presented through means of
images. Images in real time, communication in real time are the result not of an increase in
universal knowledge, but of an in increase in technology.
Our times are obsessed by real events. Indeed, but what is Real? There is no doubt that
we live in a culture of avalanche of images and information. Everything has to be seen,

everything has to be visible. Yet this excess of visibility in the end nullifies everything. It is a bit like the myth of Orpheus and Euridice. Orpheus turns round to look at her and uridice disappears forever into Hades. These thoughts sprang to mind after reading the book by David Shields “Reality Hunger, a manifesto”.
By means of aphorisms, the author gets right to the point of reality in relation to art. In parts Shields is near the vision of Baudrillard when he affirms that our culture lives in the paradox of excessive reality, just as a bulimic person will eat enormous quantities of food (read information and images) only to expel it all, and this craving for food-images translates into its exact opposite, the void, in the anxiety and the continuous desire for a reality tied to experience and to human relations. Artists necessarily have to come to terms with their times or be exiled from history and they are the perfect antidote to every form of prevarication inherent in the system of imposed images, from the domination of technocratic thought necessitated by consumption. The freedom not only of expression but of our very being is at stake. How to resist the tendency to reduce our lives to a media fiction? “The role of art – Pierre Restany wrote – is to awaken and purify the spirit”. All philosophers have questioned themselves about what reality is without ever reaching a complete and exhaustive definition. Foremost amongst them all, Nietzsche, who having foreseen the advent of nihilism, the culture which we are living today, exhorted us to be ourselves. Today a lot of our energy is directed towards a reality of appearances and conformity. The “know yourself” is the light which illuminates human existence. It is what the Greeks called eudemonia, referring to those who created their own “demon”, or ather their own specific virtue, the reason why we have come into the world. For this artists, by looking in and looking out, are the ones who more than anyone else can answer the question which as it happens is also the title of this exhibition: Reality, What Reality? Because in the never-rending flow of global communication, it is the assiduous patrons of the reign of the symbolic, of the invisible and the visible, who are the ideal interpreters of this dual reality.
In synthesis: real or virtual, art has to stir deep emotions” .

Stefania Carrozzini

Poetry reading: Stefano Losi, “Under the Burnt Walls”
Stefano Losi, Italian poet and artist based in New York, will read at the opening of
the show a collection of epigrams from the volume “Under the Burnt Walls”, issued
last March.

The exhibition is composed of 24 artworks: photographs and paintings.
The catalogue is available at the gallery.

For more information please visit our website at: www.onishigallery.com