Carte Blanche à David Douard 

Mostra personale.

Comunicato stampa

With inner GLOw’ replica, David Douard is the first international artist to receive carte blanche from Basement Roma. Based on the format conceived and produced for years by the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Basement Roma’s exhibition program now draws on one of the central figures of a new digital grammar that is translated by the artist into a complex scenography inhabited by works, sound, shapes, and other means of expression. Here, discarded elements, fragments, and objects are mixed with the apparently ephemeral nature of images drawn from the Internet and AI outcomes, creating hybrid, disconnected environments infected with new narrative germs that replace the real world and profoundly transform it. Douard’s works break into the exhibition space by altering spatial coordinates through temporary walls, passages, obstacles and shortcuts, and the reactivation of multiple recovered and assembled elements, thus physically and mentally intertwining with the work of the other invited artists: Nicolas Ceccaldi, Valerie Keane, and Antoine Trapp.

Starting from the gif novel Zac’s Haunted House by American author Dennis Cooper – a new graphic novel that replaces classical literary grammar – the exhibition converges in the idea of a constant ambivalence of the role of the viewer, an active observer but also an unwitting accomplice of a new connectivity that calls into play the physical, objectual, and sculptural dimension of the work and the blurred contours of a new digital permeability. The space, only apparently neutral to the new technologies, is thus re-read as an unprecedented repertoire of poetic fragments, capable of taking on unexpected forms in the context of the détournement operated by the artist, in which each element is translated into another, in a gaze that is never univocal but plural.

With thanks to Basement Roma’s Members who support Basement Roma’s exhibition program.

Basement Roma is a contemporary art center and a no-profit organization founded in Rome in 2012 and run by CURA.