Veduta dell’installazione presso Careof, Milano. 2010.

8

Careof, Milan, Italy.
Currently one of the most interesting and active contemporary art spaces in Italy, and home to a significant video art archive, Careof is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of artistic research, by younger artists in particular. In his latest solo show at Careof, Giovanni Oberti has set out to address the challenge of giving visible form to the diurnal passage of time, and to show through its multiple physical manifestations how it is a palpable ‘living’ matter. Invited by curator Chiara Agnello to devise a project that considers the concept of space, Oberti has created a ‘time production’ device based on simple atmospheric phenomena in the gallery and which can convey the appearance of time — its physical composition, its manifold material forms. The artist has traced these temporal processes in the dust, humidity and light of the space, creating works that become expressions of the phenomenology of time.
The title of Oberti’s installation, ‘8’ (all works 2010), is a reference to the infinity symbol and to the cyclical nature of time. It also serves as the impetus for one of the works in the exhibition — a small neon light that recalls an hourglass or a Mobius strip (Untitled (8)). Placed high on the wall at the far end of the gallery, the neon emits a flickering yellow light denoting the incessant flux of the material from one state to another. The references to numerology — the number eight is a magic number — and to science are extended by the almost mystical chronology that is written into the natural order of things: the solar system is composed of eight planets; eight is the atomic number for oxygen; and, in Christian symbolism, the transfiguration took place on the eighth day after the crucifixion.
If light constitutes the fixed visual element of the exhibition, the other works in the show are subject to the effects of time, altering their physical form on a daily basis and leaving traces of this transformative process behind. On entering the space, viewers are confronted by an expanse of water on the concrete floor (Untitled). During the course of the day, the liquid gradually diminishes as it is evaporated by dehumidifying units. The puddle is then re-created every evening when the water that has collected in the units is poured back onto the floor in exactly the same spot. Internal humidity — which we cannot see but must perceive, in the same way we can sense time — is momentarily rendered material before being returned to its original state, leaving only the faintest trace of itself in the limescale deposits formed on the concrete floor.
Oberti offers viewers the opportunity to observe the process of accumulation, stratification and entropy of the particles of existence, which are then reintegrated at the boundary of the real, the ephemeral and the metaphysical. In Untitled (Pedestal for Dust) , the subject and medium of the work is the dust generated from the general use of the space over time, as well as from various substances the artist has placed around the gallery. Allowed to accumulate on the top of a two-metre-high pedestal, the dust will remain unseen until the end of the exhibition, when Oberti will dismantle the pedestal and display the dust-covered stone inside a glass vitrine.

Marinella Paderni, 2010 – Frieze magazine

Translated by Rosalind Furness