↳ Exhibitions

Nelson Pernisco at White Noise Gallery

December 14, 2019

Artist: Nelson Pernisco

Exhibition title: L’eternité n’est guère plus longue que la vie

Curated by: Eleonora Aloise, Carlo Maria Lolli Ghetti

Venue: White Noise Gallery, Rome, Italy

Date: November 20, 2019 – January 11, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and White Noise Gallery, Rome

Nelson Pernisco’s personal and artistic life is strongly connected to the urban context and its inherent dynamics. In 2013 he was among the founders of the Le Wonder, collective, artist-run space, exhibition hall and nomadic cultural production site moving around abandoned buildings of the French capital. The need to reconstruct from scratch an empty building, into a space of cultural research and production, was the main element suggesting Pernisco a reflection on the modern idea of architecture and urban space.

According to the architect Oscar Niemeyer, “Architecture may have a political function, just because it deals with man and its way of living.” The idea of architecture that identifies Le Wonder locations is analogical, generated by necessities, dense of connections, spirits and energy. An almost anachronistic oasis in a urban panorama which gets immediately old, where the tsunami of progress calls for an immediate swap between old and new; a new that is utilitarian, functional, distant and chrome-plated.

This modern, absolute and depersonalized architectural paradigm generates copycatted habitats crossing cultures and geography. These are able to reassure modern population despite completely losing any dialogue with the single human being. Aseptic waiting lounges, continuously repeating themselves like Chinese boxes in modern cities in which citizens are treated like background instead of active actors.

Each sculpture created by Nelson Pernisco is the result of the “resistance” he opposes to the dehumanization of contemporary habitat. His guerrilla fighters are coming from the vast army of the street furniture that we are totally addicted to, invisible object that populate our lives. Aluminum structures recalling barriers and fences, so obvious to the eye to be deprived of any significance or function. These soulless objects are background actors in a deeply standardized environment that is no more centered on the individual. Pernisco creates his personal catalogue of pieces of equipment transformed into modern totems through the use of archaic masks and aluminum gargoyles. Mystical objects that bring back modern man to his existentialist roots through the juxtaposition of ancient iconography and modern utilitarianism.

The artistic research of Nelson Pernisco is not focused on the pure creation of a fetish but embraces the entire process that switches from a mechanical to a conceptual and performing act. Devoted to his vision, the entire construction process of every piece is entirely realized by the artist. Using one of the urban objects he found in the city Nelson was able to create a furnace in the new location of the Wonder in order to melt and mold the aluminum masks. The result is a production characterized by an industrial aesthetic and an artisanal nature that is able to speak to this century using an ancient language.

Born in Paris in 1993. Currently living and working in Paris.

Nelson Pernisco’s work has to be explored the way we would approach the third-places he makes his own; seen as a space of free indiscipline where critical thinking breads new utopias.

From urban squats to industrial wastelands, the visual artist took it upon itself to discover the various means of occupying territories, of constructing housings and the way they act as a catalyst for political orders.

His aesthetic is dry and in some way, brutalist. He relies on recycling poor and recovered materials, presented as touchstones of a world that may already be in ruins, and is at best under never-ending construction.

Borrowed from the urban environment, from industrial properties or from the realm of technology, these fragments are used to reflect the precariousness of time and the urgency of rethinking forms.

Nelson Pernisco, L’eternité n’est guère plus longue que la vie, 2019, exhibition view, White Noise Gallery, Rome

Nelson Pernisco, L’eternité n’est guère plus longue que la vie – Sun entity and Lucifer, Casted aluminium and aluminium tubes, 250x108x130 cm, 2019

Nelson Pernisco, L’eternité n’est guère plus longue que la vie – Ashurnasirpal Palace – Grotesque gargoyle form the clock of the old town hall tower, Prague, Casted aluminium and aluminium tubes, 165x216x220 cm, 2019