No Vacancy at MONTI8

Artists: Christian Ruiz Berman, Veronica Fernandez, Asif Hoque, Ricardo Partida, Lindsey Kircher, Pietro Moretti

Exhibition title: No Vacancy

Venue: MONTI8, Latina, Italy

Date: August 7 – 31, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and MONTI8

MONTI8 is excited to announce “No Vacancy“, a summer show featuring the works of: Christian Ruiz Berman, Veronica Fernandez, Asif Hoque, Ricardo Partida, Lindsey Kircher and Pietro Moretti. The show brings together a group of young artists who reflect on the creation of new myths and rites in contemporary society. Every age has had its own rituals and mythological narrations. The question to be asked is what are these rites and narrations today? To what themes do they have to refer and how is the artist able to answer these questions? Undoubtedly today the question that is to the greatest degree debated is that of identity – understood in its diverse acceptations. Cultural identity, gender or sexual identity, for example, are questions that have become of fundamental importance in a multicultural universe such as the world we live in today. It is in fact above all thanks to technology that barriers no longer exist between ‘peoples’ while, at the same time, there is the danger that differences in and of diversity are eliminated. The same is true for human relations which with the development and spread of the Internet and social networks have become extremely complicated. In such a complex present-day situation both mythology and the rite are necessary in order to maintain – or in certain cases to ‘retrieve’ – not only the identities of a people but also the identity of the individual.

In the works of Veronica Fernandez, the artist depicts scenes from the Latin people’s daily life, for example a family or a group of people gathering to eat together, in a sort of ritual. Christian Ruiz Berman too, creates works where his Mexican origin is always a fundamental element, and it is evoked by some symbols which may recall pre-Columbian civilizations. Pietro Moretti’s paintings, in this show, are focused on loneliness and isolation, two of the crucial aspects of the present- day society, Lastly, mithology is the main theme in the survey of Ricardo Partida, Asif Hoque and Lindsey Kircher, whose works portray pictures where the figures are not even recognizable as human beings: in fact, their characters look as new mithological figures suspended between a fantastic and real world.

In very different ways, each artist deals with issues of the contemporary society, trying to find new keys to interpreting reality.