HC at Damien & The Love Guru hosted at CFA Live

Artist: HC

Exhibition title: Non Dentro Ma Intorno A Noi

Venue: Venue: Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels hosted by CFA Live, Milan

Date: April 9 – 30, 2021

Photography: © Héctor Chico / Andrea Rossett / courtesy of the artist and Damien & The Love Guru

How can a double vase or half a chair transmit a sense of irony within a symmetrical composition? How can the ex-perience of a landscape during a journey be translated into an exhibition display? Does a pedestal still matter despite its hierarchical submission to the object it supports? Does a painting today retain a certain idea of authorship and tem-porality? Can my individuality be interrupted by our collab-oration? These questions deal with issues of perception, the intrinsic possibilities and the very borders of the objects that surround us. Where does the journey begin and where does it end? Non Dentro Ma Intorno A Noi projects us into a for-mal and informal itinerary of sculpture. The atmosphere in the exhibition space is stylised and naive at once, arranged with symmetrical rigour but unravelling with humor. In-situazione. The inner environment design objects seem to have a congenital need to go outside, in the surrounding.

“They felt surrounded by the idea but it didn’t enter them.” [1]

Invitation to travel. A few kilometres on the way from Frankfurt to Milan. A stop in the Alps. Destination: Via Rossini 3.

Unexpected results in between. Specular coincidences, with more than one head and two legs, with half a chair and two double vases. HC: four hands. They drew a map to get lost. They came to a city hidden by mountains. They painted en plein air among those peaks, exhaling their snowy breath. Objets trouvés. They shared an itinerary, coming to a lake that “was covered with a shattered looking glass.”[2] The deadly season charged a triptych of mirroring mountains with symbols. Two artists on the same journey that a painter took a century ago. They prepared replicas to be exhibited, an immersive appropriation of distorted normality. From one object to another, from one surface to its symmetri-cal arrangement, the idea of filiation came up. The seriality typical of vessels gave way to the historical conception of uniqueness. It is time to question the traditional categories within ourselves. Let’s ferry them around.

“We ended up taking part in a bizarre ritual.”[3]

-Sonia D’Alto

[1] All quotes attributed to HC are taken from our conversation during their trip from Frankfurt to Milan
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.