Animal Show at Acappella

Artists: Monika Chlebek, Coline Marotta, Marta Ravasi, André Wendland, Andersen Woof, Kyveli Zoi

Exhibition title: Animal Show

Venue: Acappella, Naples, Italy

Date: December 18, 2021 – February 15, 2022

Photography: © Danilo Donzelli / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Acappella, Naples

“It is good that we feel the equality that exists between us”
M. de Montaigne

Comic joke on the Cucciolone biscuit ice cream: a girl and a dog in the water at the sea.

The girl says to the dog: – You’re good at being a dog.
– Thanks! – replies the dog.

Cold comedy aside, the pun introduces a serene deconstruction of Cartesian anthropocentrism. Basically, it works as an extreme synthesis of Derrida. Descartes, it is known, discovers the defect of speech in animals, in the rationally organized form of that characteristic articulation of speech which is a response. As the cartoon shows, this is an obvious aporia: a dog, for example, can perfectly respond. The point is that this answer will never be in tune, that is, synchronously in tune. To explain better, it occurs Rilke, when he doubts that a man can ever be said to be contemporary with a cat. Rilke, presenting Balthus’s drawings to the cat Mitsou, states precisely that the essential characteristic of a cat is never knowing anything about what he sees and what he thinks. The existence of him is a vmere hypothesis. More or less starting from these premises, we go towards that particular species of animal which is a painted animal. If this condition is the same as the primitive one that impresses the sus celebensis in the Sulawesi caves, obviously this is impossible to ascertain. However, it is always good to believe that an authentic European spirit changes without aging anything, including the rocks illustrated by the designers of the Pleistocene. The archaic influences are, moreover, quite explicit for all the artists of the Animal Show. We are immediately grateful to him, to this diverse group of new Fauves. They circumscribe the space of the small temple of Acappella in a religious or parareligious dimension, or rather as a neon reservoir of the spiritual or paraspiritual values that sustain the living before science, as Duchamp wrote. In fact, rather than recalling a bucolic idyll, the Animal Show emotional landscape is charged with the disquiet of a frontier. On the other hand, behind a veil of black humor, there is an epiphany of a logically elusive posthuman. This causes a discreet disturbance, to the extent that the alleged superiority of reason is overturned against the cognitive value of the senses. Yet, sensoriality is the chance that the body provides to produce and define itself through the other. Because the substance of the encounter can only emerge in the action of a metamorphosis. Here is the moment that art offers to the conscience on the spoon of morality: an interstice in the wall of the world, through which to feel what is beyond the mirror: from Apuleius to today, the place where every single blow that we gave to the ass comes back to us.

-Ernesto Tedeschi

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Animal Show, 2021, exhibition view, Acappella, Naples

Marta Ravasi, Due farfalle, oil on canvas, 2020, 36 x 29 cm