Giorgione's 'The Tempest'
Old friends and past collaborators Mat Collishaw and Paul Fryer are to join forces for the Venice Biennale this year - all under the wise and fatherly eye of curator James Putnam.
The spirited trio are going all High Renaissance on us, by responding to Giorgione's 'The Tempest', which hangs in the city's Accademia museum and has been identified as the first landscape in the history of Western painting. Giorgione is famed for having an overwhelming influence on his contemporaries and immediate successors in the Venetian school, including Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma il Vecchio, il Cariani, Giulio Campagnola, and even on his already eminent master, Giovanni Bellini.
The venue for Putnam's show, 'Tempest', is an old artisans' workshop - now the Gervasuti Foundation - on Venice's main drag, Via Garibaldi, the city's widest street. The party to celebrate the exhibition is already set for the Metropole Hotel, which also has its own art collection and was Marcel Proust's favourite hotel in Venice.
Paul Fryer, work in progress
Mat Collishaw, work in progress
Fryer and Collishaw have collaborated to produce an installation in response to Giorgione's enigmatic painting portraying a soldier and a breast-feeding woman on either side of a stream, against the backdrop of an oddly modern-looking city of rubble and an incoming storm. Art historians over the years have despaired about the painting's multitude of symbols and 'hidden meanings'. With this in mind Collishaw and Fryer's project "explores ideas of duality, positive and negative forces and notions of balance and imbalance". Putnam understands that "what we perceive as permanent is rarely so and human life moves precariously on the edge of an unseen abyss. This is to some extent reflected by the context of the city of Venice, where the apparent solidity of its construction belies the ongoing threat of its impermanence. Although the scene depicted in the painting appears restful, peaceful and silent everything seems to anticipate the violence of the impending storm heralded by a bolt of lightning."
Lightning is an electrical spark on a vast scale and Fryer's recent work has involved the creation of unsettling, handsome machines that incorporate miniature lightning propagated by millions of volts of electricity. "No one really seems to know what the painting's about, and I'm no exception," he told me. "However, there's lightning in the picture, and my piece makes lightning. I have tried to bring it to life a little. It's as direct as I could make it."
Collishaw's current creations involve jewel-like video projections combined with anamorphic viewing devices, where the distorted image appears normal when reflected in a cylindrical mirror. His idealized panoramic landscape backgrounds often allude to the pagan themes in Renaissance paintings.
Collishaw told me, "I'm showing an animated projection of the painting presented in the form of a cylinder anamorphosis. As one does. My work is basically the contrasting of two different viewpoints. The chaos of untamed nature as it appears in the projection on the floor: wild and unruly, without order. And nature restrained as it appears in the reflection in the cylinder: ordered, controlled and accessible. The painting itself plays with these elements, bringing nature into a commodfiable vision. And then suggesting the unruly and capricious hostility that threatens the peace between a couple and their newborn."
Putnam, Fryer and Collishaw all agree that Giorgione was a person deserving of a tribute, a man of "distinguished and romantic charm, a great lover and musician, given to express in art the sensuous and imaginative grace, touched with poetic melancholy, of the Venetian existence of his time". The variant Giorgione also means 'Big George,' which seems somehow fitting for a show that promises this amount of vim and vigour.
Laura K Jones
'The Tempest' is curated by James Putnam in association with Diip and the Gervasuti Foundation, Venice with the generous support of Mary Moore.
The Tempest Mat Collishaw and Paul Fryer
curated by James Putnam
The Gervasuti Foundation
Fondamenta S. Ana (Via Garibaldi)
Castello 995, Venice
June 8 - November 21, 2007
www.jamesputnam.org.uk
www.paulfryer.net
Laura K Jones is a London-based journalist and a regular news correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine.
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