Good morning, and welcome to Artissima 2024. This is the AudioGuide project and you are listening to tour number 2 entitled Spatial Research. In an essay entitled Specific Objects - considered one of the most important foundations of minimalism - Donald Judd states: “The work of art does not exist except in relation to its environment”. This concept marked the beginning of a revolution that would radically transform artistic production in the 1960s, leaving an indelible mark on the entire international scene. The public is suddenly confronted with works that defy traditional expectations: hanging canvases, paintings and isolated sculptures have given way to metal blocks, trunks and modular structures that intertwine with the surrounding light and architecture. The intention is to radically alter the perception of space. It is a silent revolution, orchestrated by artists who break with the idea of art as an autonomous object. Movements such as Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Arte Povera were pioneers in offering immersive experiences that go beyond the mere contemplative act of the work, inviting the audience to participate and interact with it directly. The products of these works are transformed into living entities, capable of altering their environment and in turn undergoing a transformation dictated by the perspective of the observer. Observation, recognition, transformation, and immersion are in fact the key words that accompany Spatial Research, an itinerary dedicated to the discovery of artists who have conceived practices and research starting from their relationship with the surrounding space. The audioguides were developed for Artissima by the mediators of Arteco. This tour was curated by Camilla Zennaro. We are ready to go. Pause your player and head for the Present/Future section, where our tour will begin. You will find the Astuni-Public Studio gallery stand along the black corridor at number 9, Press play once you are there.

Welcome to the Present/Future section. The Bologna-based Enrico Astuni Gallery presents the Geneva artist Bastien Gachet, with a selection of works previewed last September as part of ASTUNIpublicSTUDIO, an exhibition programme that the gallery has been dedicating to young trends in contemporary art since 2009. Let’s start with one of the most immersive stands of the fair: a non-place capable of stimulating deep reflection around the “space-fruition” combination. In 1949, Lucio Fontana introduced the term “environment” to describe works that, lying on the borderline between art, architecture and design, experiment with space in an innovative way, creating and transforming it. It is no longer a question of contemplating a work as a separate entity, but of passing through it and interacting with it, immersing oneself in a new dimension that blurs the boundaries between the spectator and the environment. It is this attitude of artistic making that drives Bastien Gachet to create his contemporary environment: an aluminium structure that separates the stand in an irregular manner. Flat-ground steel lamps project cold beams of light onto an aseptic area populated by ambiguous everyday objects: a bench, a few stacked chairs, a facsimile washing machine... It is now up to the visitors to find out what else is hidden. Gachet questions the concept of site specificity by transforming modular and soulless places, such as trade fair stands, into ambiguous environments inspired by industrial aesthetics. Here, the boundary between the false and the real becomes thin: objects that appear to be infrastructural are located in liminal spaces and never crystallise into concrete forms, maintaining a state of indeterminateness in which meanings and relationships constantly change. We have finished our first stage. Pause your player and continue towards the 1/9unosunove and Annex14 stand in the Monologue/Dialogue section, along the Orange corridor at number 6. Press play once you are there. I’ll be waiting for you!

Welcome to the Monologue/Dialogue section. The second leg of the itinerary offers us a selection of recent works by London-based artist Simon Callery, presented by the galleries 1/9unosunove of Rome and Annex14 of Zurich. Internationally established since his debut with Young British Artists at the Saatchi Gallery in 1994, Callery is a leading figure in the British art scene. His research reconsiders the relationship between art and space through monochrome creations that explore the potential of the pictorial surface and invite reflection on material and immaterial dynamics. Since the early 1990s, Callery’s visual language has developed from the observation of the urban landscape and its geometries, culminating in 1997 in a deep interest in archaeology. That year, the artist began collaborating with the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford University to document the Segsbury Camp excavation site in the UK. It is from this study that the Full Circle Pit Paintings series was born, which you can admire on the left wall: extensive aluminium or canvas frames and paint applied in thin, intermittent layers, projecting 90 degrees from the wall. The decentralisation of the front surface of the works enhances their volume: inside-outside takes on a new relevance, giving shape to what transcends the traditional concept of two-dimensional painting. On the opposite wall, the work Contact Painting Rome (Alexandrino), created after his time as a fellow at the British School of Rome in 2018, reflects the artist’s dedication to mapping the city’s environmental elements, such as archaeological ruins, suburban parks and the Tiber River. Rather than a simple representation, the work takes the form of a document of physical contact with the place, suggesting a deeper and more immersive relationship with the surrounding environment. If, over the years, plastic art has investigated spatial dimensions in different ways, adopting symbolic, ideal, mimetic and functional forms, this reflection remains central to Callery’s work. His contemporary approach reworks and questions the foundations of these disciplines, deepening the dialogue between space and perception. Pause your player and head for the white corridor in the Drawings section. On the right you will find the Rowland Gallery at number 8. Press play once you are there. I’ll be waiting for you!

Our journey continues with the 3+1 Arte Contemporânea Gallery in the curated Back to the Future section. We now meet Portuguese artist Alberto Carneiro, a leading figure in Portuguese culture and one of the most awarded artists of his generation. It is 1968, a year of social and political revolutions on an international level, and Alberto Carneiro is about to present his “Manifesto of Ecological Art”. Far from attempts to “humanise” the urban environment, Carneiro proposes a radical visual language that invites us to redefine our relationship with space, but this time it is the natural one. His vision is not limited to theoretical reflection, but calls for concrete action to re-establish an authentic and conscious connection with the world around him. Carneiro’s cultural contribution was decisive in freeing Portuguese sculpture from the illustrative statuary imposed by the totalitarian regime, pushing it towards conceptual, performative and experimental questions, in tune with the international research of the 1960s. His artistic practice reinterprets Conceptual Art, Land Art and Minimalism in a visceral way, in dialogue with artists such as Giuseppe Penone and Richard Long, who share with him the idea of an art deeply rooted in natural space and direct experience. These concepts find expression in the work Aesthetic Operation in the Alto de São João, presented at Artissima 2024: a social composition of 44 photographs taken during various performances and actions carried out in the 1970s in natural settings. The notes to the “Manifesto of Ecological Art” emphasise the aesthetic connection between the work and the earth, revealing the artist’s further intention to immerse the viewer’s body in the surrounding space, in dialogue with the specific conditions of the location. The second work on display is a sculpture from the Evocations of Water series, composed of logs and plant bundles. This creation embodies the artist’s interest in materiality and connection to the earth, while representing the movement of water and its fluid essence. In Evocations of Water, water is transformed into the generating element of dynamic forms, while the tree emerges as substance, archetype and symbol. We have finished our fourth stage. Pause your player and head for the Pinksummer Gallery in the Main Section along the Pink B corridor, at number 12. Press play once you are there. I’ll be waiting for you!

Our journey ends in the Main Section of the fair. The Genoese Pinksummer Gallery introduces us to the work of American artist Peter Fend. Peter Fend’s visions grow and develop in space in an almost hypertextual way: railways, migrations, drilling, language, maps, geopolitics. Fend deconstructs and reconstructs. His projects are based on political and social, as well as ecological, considerations, according to his conviction that art and architecture “must come together to create structures that are not just forms, but living experiences”. Situated between land art, architecture and science, Peter Fend’s work often uses satellite images to address ecological and territorial issues. The artist seeks innovative solutions to environmental problems, revealing how art can transform space, taking on a specifically social and geopolitical role. For Artissima 2024, Pinksummer invites the public to reflect on the many futures that await us. The stand houses a large illuminated sign, one of a larger series, arranged in an oblique position. First installed in 1999 in the outdoor space at the back of the Nikolai Fine Art Gallery in New York, directly adjacent to an Esso station, the blue and red illuminated signs visually merged with the fluctuating lights of the petrol station’s signage, forming the Global Warming/Global Terror sign. Extending the petrol station beyond its original design and towards the street, these works represent an alarming alteration of the symbols elevated by Ed Ruscha and other American industrial landscape painters, recontextualising the territory and spatiality of the landscape in a completely new way. The work is a powerful warning that transforms the exhibition space into a place for critical reflection, urging the public to question the connections between art, territory and ecological emergency. We've finished our fifth and final stage. We hope that this tour has stimulated and intrigued you. If you want another perspective on the fair, go back to the infopoint or the AudioGuides landing page and select another tour! See you soon and enjoy Artissima!