A CONCEPT OF MAKING ART
TO DARE
The artist has by his nature the need to expand the time of creation. For this, to withdraw from a part of social relations. This never to isolate himself. How much to contain what is strictly necessary
The work is nothing more than an idea, a dark and invisible fragment, which is transformed into a perceptible, concrete object. All the artist's work is DARE . A courageous act of great mastery in dragging out of himself, in the visible, that body-to-body odor, that mood that hovers around his unique and unknown imagination. He does not describe, he does not imitate. He simply transfers what he seems to have seen or understood. A work which encourages and discourages, which testifies and questions.
DARE . Who can have this daring today?
Only artists can do it, because it is the fundamental part of their work.
DARE today, in a separate and hostile world, means taking on the responsibility of putting the work of art back at the center and working with it: the place, space and time in which the artist creates, installs, exhibits. A few years ago, exactly in a spring of 1984 in Naples, some artists founded the VIRUS group on these assumptions. After a few years of human and personal vicissitudes, G. Ceraldi, C. Chierici and G. Savino, a constituent part of that group, refound it in Rome together with the sculptor S.de Santis.
On 30 September 2020 the VIRUS group , together with the association Community X have inaugurated a free and open space in Corviale. A space as a cultural offer to the city and in particular to Corviale, a place for meetings, comparisons, exhibitions and events. the intent is to propose a human art, where the line does not measure the surface, but the sentimental specific weight that supports the harmony between distant points. A strong beat. An emotion.
VIRUS group - The origin
In 1987 in Naples in the studio of G.Savino in Via Benedetto Croce, 38, on a hot day in May, Giulio Ceraldi, Salvatore Ravo, Consuelo Chierici, Giancarlo Savino, Dino Izzo, Antonio Neiwiller, Stelio M.Martini at the end of a long passionate discussion about the art system, its perverse paths, so self-referential and penalizing towards the artists themselves, decided to found the group called Virus
This premise, in somewhat notarized language, sanctioned a pact of artistic collaboration and sharing of the human and social condition of the signatory artists.
Virus, was the name chosen and it was decided because in this term was intended to indicate a vocation of contagion towards society and the whole system that revolved around the figurative arts. A contagion that rested its foundation on the concept that art is a way. A way to bear witness to the feeling of the times, each with his own experiences, techniques and themes that society solicits from time to time. The Virus group, therefore, was not born out of a technical affinity, it was not the usual trendy group, like the abstractionists, the figuratives, etc., but out of the need to restore a mode, outside the imperative hegemony of market rules. Art must have different times from the times of the market. With this in mind, the group pursues certain goals: first of all, put back at the center of the Art system, the figure of the artist and his place of work; the studio. Establish that the art object, can never be a commodity, understood as a purely consumer object. Because in it there is an investment of desires and emotions that, cannot be consumed once and for all. With these premises, an art object, though closely linked to its time, makes itself immortal.
The other fundamental point on which the group was founded is to give visibility to the artist's work, action and position in society. Since its founding, the group has declared the need to abandon the aims and illusions of the art economic system, which through galleries, foundations and museums, does not pursue a mode of choices based on the value of the work, but on the drives of its own fashions and novelties. Against this state of affairs, the virus group enacted a visibility movement that includes the activation of the workplace: the studio, as a place of visibility of the work and at the same time a moment of aesthetic and cultural education. A visit to an artist's studio, becomes an extraordinary experience of meeting gazes, emotions. It overturns the false idea that not everyone can understand art and establishes, on the contrary, that a work of art, if it is such, is not subject to any specific understanding, it comes to the gaze with the bearer of a collective emotional experience, which involves everyone, in a process that goes from seeing to feeling to wanting to keep it to oneself. For all this, In September 1987 the virus group launched the first open studio event in Naples. The 30 artists who participated opened their studios to the public who flocked curious and enthusiastic. We had found a way to find visibility for everyone. A real and non-tendentious way to open a debate about art and at the same time to make selection. In 2022, the Ministry of Culture and the Special Superintendence, organized a retrospective exhibition on the Virus group at the Dragstore Museum in Rome. Historicizing its activity as a quest for innovation in the field of figurative art. Currently, the group consists of Consuelo Chierici, Giulio Ceraldi and Giancarlo Savino.
ART IS A WAY
On 30 September 2020 it opened in Corviale, a space freed up.
And a free space is born. With an inaugural collective exhibition that we called: ART IS A WAY / INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE
A space that the artists Giulio Ceraldi, Consuelo Chierici, Giancarlo Savino, who currently form the Virus group have subtracted from their work area to make it an open and free space.
A chance for how many; visual artists, writers, musicians, videomakers, etc .. want to use to create a moment of comparison and show the fruit of their research. An offer to the city of Rome. An innovative proposal, not surprisingly, starts from Corviale, a suburb often forgotten and subjected to prejudices and bad information.
A liberated place, where the quality of the work and the human position of the artist who produces it will be central.
It is not the first time that the Virus ars group has promoted liberating initiatives, compared to the shoals that the market has built to prevent a direct relationship between artists and the public.
Since 1984, the year in which the group was founded and until today, in the various formations, it has elaborated events such as "Studi Aperti" Museo Diffuso Urbano and other events, all events aimed at freeing culture from the locks that prevent, the flow of widespread creativity , to show themselves freely, in different forms and expressions.
The inaugural exhibition entitled Art is a way / instructions for use , involves a significant part of the recent production of the Virus group group. These are paintings, sculptures, engravings which, with different technical and stylistic methods, show the same "way;" that of respond to this time, so pushed towards the boundaries of hasty consumption, works that aim at the heart of emotion and create breaks, as a tunnel to be traversed over a long period of time, to revive the patience of observation, until one discovers that the time of observation of art is itself an art.
It's a first try, a little note. A graffiti, a bacillus of a new and ancient virus that we feel beneficial and healthy, however necessary, and that we want to spread, instill, contaminate and ruinously throw at you. With the fury of sweetness, with the wisdom of simplicity, with the fire of the sea.
Scattered works, icons, large and small canvases, finished and unfinished, stones, rocks and traces of passages of poetry. Wood. In this large space torn from abandonment, neglect, the evening wind. Torn by bites and by necessity. By desire and destiny. Between the words of men and the scream of the street. Between suspicion and curiosity. Between finding and not finding oneself. At the end of the boulevard where you will see ceramic and graffiti walls. A small door, a glass, a reconstructed window and still no heating.
Art that is born in the wind and that closes drafts and rekindles skylights. Foment a new order and abandon an ancient disorder.
Art that you encounter if you pass, if you look, if you search.
Art that comes from you. Which moves and then abides and persists. Art that cuts the bodies and scatters on the ground, like dust, like freckles, like pebbles for the return of our journey.
Art that comes back after a long time. Men, artists who know where to put their hands. And therefore they know and want to teach.
A laboratory, Virus ars, which keeps ancient recipes and like the processions of the saints goes to believe or not to believe. For dancing and dining. Stop. And indeed furniture. Ancient yet very modern.
(Jonathan Giustini as a friend, curator and writer supports them in this light journey)