It's Our Pleasure to Serve You (video)

The iconic blue and white NYC take out coffee cup was the focus of  'It's Our Pleasure to Serve You' - an installation I did at the Vizivarosi Gallery in Budapest in June 2010.  On one side of the coffee cup the discobolus is featured prominently, his nudity now covered by some sort of gladiatorial skirt.  I am fascinated that an image of a sculpture created in the 5th century BC has remained in our visual vocabulary.  (The original bronze by Myron has long been lost, but a plethora of marble  copies in various states of repair still exist). 

I chose to re-interpret this image in a vocabulary unavailable to the not so distant past, but is now commonplace - a lo rez digital breakdown.  By hand painting each square, or digital unit, I have tried to re-assert a sense of the organic and unpredictable into something that usually resides in the realm of  mathematics.  Here is a video of the project (digital, of course)

ANTINOO (lost youth)



Christopher Pelley   ANTINOO (lost youth)   installation August 2011

Antinous.  The beautiful Bythinian youth and Emperor Hadrian's "beloved" (euphemism) drowned in the Nile in the year 130 AD at the age of 19.  Hadrian had him deified, had temples constructed in his honor across the empire and even built the Antinoeion, a complex of buildings and pools complete with an obelisk at his villa near modern Tivoli to enshrine the memory of this lost youth.

The image of Antinous fascinates me.  So after much looking at it, I began to deconstruct it.  This installation is a super lo-rez image of a bust of the 19 year old at Palazzo Altemps (Museo Nazionale Romano) in Rome.  The sculpture in itself is interesting merely by the fact that it was carved in the second century AD, then heavily "restored" (read re-carved) in the 18th century.  It now presents itself as the classical ideal of beauty as seen through 18th century eyes.   I have tried to interpret this singular bust from a 21st century perspective.  Each pixel of my lo-rez image is a 5cm x 5cm square of painted paper.

But why the resonance?  Why has this image continued to endure through the centuries while so many others have been neglected or forgotten?

Entering as I am into that period of life generously called middle age (another euphemism), I realize now that youth is something to be appreciated (like the lo-rez image) from a distance.

Christopher Pelley   ANTINOO (lost youth)  detail

Typography

Typography. The shape of letters help define an age. The perfect alignment and spacing of the majiscule of antique inscriptions, the increasingly huddled form of the late antique, and the expressive curves of the longobard gothic… They give us sense of time and place. There is nothing like standing in front of an imperial inscription of the first century. One feels the entire weight of empire behind it. There is an instinctive cowering when one attempts to read it.

Then there are a range of quasi-contemporary (very contemporary if you are looking at the breadth of the historical record here) shop signs in an orthography that one can only described as felliniesque. Only here in Roma have I seen these fonts. There is a joyfulness about them that can often mask the drama going on behind the shop façade. I stop and smile.  Is that a Nino Rotta soundtrack I hear playing in the background?

It's Elemental

The 4 elements.  They are basic, and well, elemental, and often overlooked today.  But sometimes its fun just to wander and watch them in action.  Here they are as I viewed them over a couple of afternoons - roman style.

Roman Laundry (the video)

Sometimes, it's good to see things in motion. The installation 'Roman Laundry (bucato alla romana)' took place on a sunny afternoon in May, 2011.  Still photography by Susan Kammerer, Kara Arterburn and Katie Morgan.  I shot the video footage.  You can hear my (barely)supressed voice saying "this is soo cool".

Roman Laundry (bucato alla romana)

Myth and Memory, History and Nostalgia, Dreams and Disappointments, I have hung them all up to dry in the afternoon Italian sun.

A temporary installation of Roman Laundry  (bucato alla romana), a group of large scale charcoal drawings that reference classical sculpture, which I have been working on over  past several months, took place on Sunday May 1, 2011 in Via de' Delfini, Roma. 


By its nature, intruding into public space invites public comment.  Without permission, I took over a street and asserted myself.  The comments were many.  The one that struck me the most was made by an Italian artist who said that in the work he can see my affection for the City.  Si, e vero.  I have great affection for this chaotic, frustrating, romantic, amazing, impeneterable and impossible place.

And a special THANKS to all who helped make this project happen!

Christopher Pelley with assistants Amanda Pratt, Katie Morgan, Kara Arterburn and Codi Lyn Harrington

  

Fade to Pale

I first ventured to Rome in the waning days of the 1970's.  The city then was awash with a riot of warm colors. The burnt oranges and ochres, rich and worn, glowed and amplified the late afternoon sun until it seemed that for a few magical moments before sunset, heaven and earth were ablaze in tandem. The maze of medieval streets in the centro storico flowed like liquid amber pouring into renaissance piazzas.  But even then I noticed that change was afoot.  The backround beat of the chip chip chip of cold steel chiseling against soft stucco and hard stone that makes up the baso continuo of the city was slowly peeling away the color and replacing it with a different historical palette.  The renaissance palazzos were being re-invisioned with a more correct color scheme.  Creams, soft whites and even limestone blues were thrusting themselves into the streetscape.

The pace has quickened in the past few years as the City continues its relentless shift from warm to cool.  Color, which once stitched together the City is now defining and seperating the social strata.  Palazzi and cheisi increasingly boast the new renaissance hues, the medieval jumble for the most part sits in begnine neglect, plaster more often than not crumbling to expose the brick and rubble construction.  The massive number of 19th century buildings which sprung into existence when the City was recreated as the capital of a unified Italy, along with the monumental public works executed to define the City as such, linger in a chromatic no-man's land.  Too young to qualify for the renaissance option, but not wanting to remain old school, a variety of solutions have developed.  Pale has become the new saturated color.  And even worse, pastel.   

Sometimes a cheap version of sponge painting popular in suburban McMansions of the late 1980's is applied to disguise that momentary regret and sense that something has been lost as the past is scraped away from these edifices and they lurch into the future.

Every once in awhile, though, you will find that rare Palazzetto, which like Miss Havisham's, proudly wears the remains of a fully saturated red ochre as a badge of honor from some ancienne regime.