Eel Soup
Federico Clavarino & Tami Izko
Viasaterna presents Eel Soup by Federico Clavarino and Tami Izko, with a selection of works by the two artists. While the former works with the flat surfaces of photographs, the latter engages with the volume of sculpture. The exhibition project revolves around the connections between the two media, narrating how they come together in space by means of reflective surfaces which embrace both the artworks and the visitor.
The title of the exhibition, Eel Soup, evokes the estranging image of a wriggling mass with no end and no beginning, fluid and shapeless. Similarly, the works twist, close and open up again in space, creating a series of significant configurations. Clavarino focuses on elusive details, on delicate natural and human presences, revealing relationships that are doomed to remain invisible when they aren't captured by the camera's lens. The artist highlights the fragility of contemporary connections, showing both the distance and the proximity of the elements he photographs, cutting out details and creating a tension between what is shown and what remains outside of the frame. The images refer to Izko's sculptures, which form organic, epidermic apparatuses, capable of translating the photographic signs into the slits and junctures of clay. Thus the plasticity of ceramics is used as a source to reproduce the human figure into multiple dimensions and forms, as the work itself is the result of an encounter, an alchemic process shaped by natural elements.
The signs and relations that are weaved between the works on display encompass the visitor in their sphere, ephemeral reality, and he is left with the task of tracing them and of creating new storylines. From the starting point of a logic of fragments, a shared terrain is then conceived, one that playfully exists between heteronomy and the negotiation of spaces, in a continuous flow.