03 June 2009

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Duemila disegni da portare via


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The Ermanno Casoli Foundation
and Elica

present:
Cesare Pietroiusti
“Duemila disegni da portare via”
Curated by Marcello Smarrelli

Duemila disegni da portare via (“Two thousand take-away drawings”), the work created by Cesare Pietroiusti together with a group of Elica company employees, was presented on Friday 15th May 2009 at Elica’s Fabriano head office, and thus becomes part of the company president Francesco Casoli’s collection  of contemporary art, Elica Contemporary – a collection which is, in turn, made available to the company employees themselves.

Duemila disegni da portare via, the result of a two-day workshop led by Cesare Pietroiusti and involving approximately thirty Elica employees, took place in Fabriano at the company’s head office. During the first meeting, the artist presented his own research and introduced the themes which would be dealt with in the second phase: error determined by chance, its side effects and its potential as a resource; and the system of economic trade and how it works, with the formulation, through the artistic work, of examples of unconventional and paradoxical market trading.

During the second meeting, Pietroiusti asked the participants to make a few hundred drawings using candle smoke and red wine – elements whose effects on the surface of the sheets are unexpected, unpredictable and impossible to control – with the aim of recognising and making creative use of chance, side-effect, and error. The designs produced, put together on a wall that forms part of the Elica company’s working environment, constitute a single complete work which will be progressively distributed amongst company employees and visitors according to the following method of exchange: those who take a design made with wine have to put it back in the same place within one year, after having been through a specific experience which must leave its traces on the sheet; while those who take a drawing made with candle smoke, described as an incomplete work, must either achieve completion  by burning it or choose to keep it in its unfinished state.

These rules, established collectively during the workshop, are explicitly set out on each single drawing by means of a special stamp, thus contributing to the evolution and transformation of the work over time.
The work was conceived in the context of E-STRAORDINARIO #2. the intelligence of chance, the second appointment in a cycle of workshops originated and curated by Marcello Smarrelli, artistic director of the Ermanno Casoli Foundation, dedicated to the relationship between art and industry.