AGOSTINO IACURCI, RICKY LEE GORDON, MONEYLESS, FEDERICO TOSI
Noa Noa

November 25th 2017/December 17th 2017
Opening: Saturday November 25th 2017 @6PM

Noa Noa is the group exhibition of  the Noa Noa Art Residency that took place from 1st to 17th July  featuring Agostino Iacurci, Ricky Lee Gordon, Moneyless and Federico Tosi.

Noa Noa displays the artworks of these artists who, inspired by the place, are now trying to express themselves through paintings, drawings, wallpainting and site-specific art installations in the most typical landscape of Bali, in between rice fields and waterfalls. The artists tried to get as close as possible to the Indonesian culture, discovering the island of Bali; they started a dialogue with themselves and the environment very soon, developing the following projects as a result.

Agostino Iacurci, born in Foggia in 1986, lives and works in Berlin. He shows a series of paintings on recycled paper made with his modus operandi. Iacurci traces nature’s synoptics profiles by synthesized shapes and colours inspired by the environment obtaining a series of drawings, very recognizable for their rigorously simple language. He takes structures from nature and give them back as an art drawing. After this first series, he has decided to act locally choosing to reproduce the same shapes on rest-houses in the rice-fields, an artwork in the most typical Balinese landscape.

Federico Tosi, born in Milan in 1988, lives and works in Milan. Wandering around with pencil and sketchbook, Tosi explores the Indonesian jungle deep down and produces a series of fast-drawings on papers, extremely detailed and evocative. With his direct and clean mark he successfully analyzes both the details and the wide landscapes created by nature. Tosi catches the least tourist aspect of this island, the hidden one of a population always increasing and in development. The common idea about Bali is getting lost between temples and untouched natural scenarios, but the truth is that the population density in South Bali is crazy and picturesque. The mopeds-flooded streets with their rowdy horns and pollution, show an inevitable ethnographical aspect. Encouraged by this chaos Tosi decided to make one sticker whose graphic is antithetical, explicit and provocative.

Moneyless, born in Milan in 1980, lives and works in Lucca. He displays a tryptic on paper made with his usual interaction between shapes, space and colours using paint cans and stencils. Moneyless proceeds layer by layer and using transparencies. He decides to spend only a few days in studio research as he prefers to focus on finding perfect spots for installations. He moves from 2D to 3D by creating solid shapes that fluctuates over the most amazing Bali’s scenery. By pulling white wool threads, supported by transparent strings and spikes, in the middle of the jungle, in front of waterfalls and thick vegetation, vivid geometrical shapes rise up. He obtains essential shapes that are conceptually far from a simple ensemble of lines.

Ricky Lee Gordon, born in Johannesburg in 1984, lives and works in Los Angeles. Ricky’s poetics has many aspects in common with the philosophy behind this art residency and with the Indonesian culture, for example his experience in meditation and Dharma (Buddhist teachings for the universal law of nature). As Ricky has always been exploring the nature of non-duality and interconnectedness, he decides to display two large canvases as a small scale reproduction of his wallpainting. It then became an appendix of a larger wallpainting in Balian. He has also performed site specific interventions using flags made from bamboo and trash bags to represent the colonization of this land. He has placed white flags where nature is left untouched as a symbol of gratitude and recognition whereas he has placed black flags to mark man’s manipulation as a symbol of misapprehension and shame. Ricky has found the perfect place to explore and investigate the relationship between man and nature in Bali and through his art he expresses that nature and man are not separate.