The exposition consisted of works in line with geometric abstraction, included in a single series, the exhibition of the same name. These are chambered sculptures made of stainless steel - the earliest "introspective" works of Murelli, as well as multi-meter structures from Siberian larch, named by the author Unlimited: they were created specifically for the Moscow exhibition. In addition, works are presented with oil pastels, in the technique of "relief" from paper and digital printing on transparent plastic (the latter form the subsection "Introspective transparency"). The works presented by the curators Anna Vyazemtseva and Evgenia Polatovskaya are characterized, despite their obvious belonging to the visual arts, with a precise and dynamic composition, bringing them closer to modern architecture.
Such analogies are not accidental: Murelli was born into a family of architects, in his student years he studied the history of art and architecture; he was influenced by such masters of composition as the founder of futurism Umberto Boccioni, Russian avant-garde artists Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. Like them, Murelli pays a lot of attention to the interaction of the object and the surrounding space, even when it comes to two-dimensional works. So, for the exhibition in RuArts he created "Introspection No. 18", a work with oil pastels 4 m wide, designed for a specific point in the interior and entering into a dialogue with the architecture of the gallery, designed by Anton Nadtochim and Vera Butko.
However, the idea of the exhibition is not limited to formal experiments: Murelli's works, as the title of both the exposition and the series suggest, are devoted to introspection - an attentive look into oneself, reflection, and the study of one's inner world. They are most easily interpreted as the result of an artist's experience of introspection. Abstraction is perhaps the ideal way to express the variety of sensations, desires and emotions that coexist inside each person at any given time. This contradictory intangible element determines our life no less than the "objective" factors of the external environment, and any figurative visual expression will deprive it of most of its content, therefore, in geometric figures and in intersecting lines, the only formal language possible for it is seen.
But there is also another level of perception of Riccardo Murelli's works, proposed by the prominent Italian art critic Ludovica Lumer: in her opinion, they are a kind of therapy tool that allows the viewer to meet with himself. In sculptures and graphic sheets of "Introspection" there is no other meaning than lying on the surface: a combination of lines and colored planes, surfaces and volumes. But the person looking at them, in the process of contemplating the work, plunges into the world of his fears and desires, coming into contact with his emotions.
If we develop Lumer's thought, we will again come to the conclusion that abstractionism is the most universal direction in contemporary art, which allows us to rise above the limitations of objectivity, which introduces fragments of reality into the process of communication between the viewer and the work and thereby “clogs” it. This is a kind of ideal “mirror of the soul”: it can be said about it in the words of Jacques Derrida: “the only situation of human existence in which a person finds himself alone with himself … the world leaves, and I finally find myself”. Derrida spoke this way about death, but Murelli's geometric abstractions represent an alternative to such fatalism, inviting the viewer to look at life - life within oneself.
The exhibition will run until January 21, 2012.
