Carlo Bernardini’s light room enriches the new Piazza Edmondo Berselli in Castelnuovo Rangone with a site-specific intervention entitled ‘Principio dell’Infinito’. It will be inaugurated on Friday 29 November at 6.30 pm in the presence of the artist and the people involved in its realisation.
Image above: Carlo Bernardini, Principio dell’Infinito
This art installation was realised by the municipality of Castelnuovo Rangone on the basis of a project by the artist Carlo Bernardini in collaboration with the cultural association Ricognizioni Sull’Arte, chaired by the curator Alessandro Mescoli. Councillor Sofia Baldazzini was involved in the initial phase of the project and, at the end of her term of office, she ideally handed it over to the current councillors Stefano Solignani and Matteo Ferrari, who skilfully and carefully saw it through to its monumental realisation. The complex technical work was carried out by the local company Stile Impianti. The most important phases of the installation were documented by the Modenese photographer Mauro Terzi with photos, videos and interviews.
The large, approximately 18-metre-wide light work consists of special optical fibres and is characterised by a contemporary and modern appearance, while at the same time being able to create a dialogue with the existing architecture from the town’s past. The artistic intervention emphasises the past of this place and its memory depending on the level of imagination, thus symbolising the unity and cultural openness of Castelnuovo.
There are various references that the ‘light artist’, as Bernardini is known, has incorporated into this installation. In addition to explaining the poetics that characterise him worldwide for this type of intervention, capable of redefining space through illusory games of perspective and figuration, particular meanings emerge here. The work that Carlo Bernardini has created for Piazza Berselli symbolises a great ‘seam’, an ‘emotional bond’ that the town, the women and men of Castelnuovo demonstrate by holding together the different souls and identities of the territory: the environment, the work of the citizens, the history, the social and cultural commitment that have always characterised Castelnuovo Rangone.
Secondly, but not secondarily, the trajectories of light that constitute this work of art in a minimally material way lead back to the past of this square, to the time when it housed the cinema of the Verdi Theatre. Today, the light and the light beams of Bernardini’s installation manifest the magic and the allusion to the light beam of the old cinema projector that is synthesised here. These optical fibres, which highlight the space and architectural elements of the square, are aimed at the historical core of the village and emphasise it through a visual corridor, bringing it into direct connection with the natural space of the Rio Gamberi park. Carlo Bernardini’s intervention enhances a part of the town by opening and embellishing a kind of access portal. Another dimension that closely links the centre of the village with its most articulated edges. This work of art is part of an existing and evolving path of public art that extends across the entire municipal area and joins the other works by Giuliano Della Casa, Francesca Dondoglio, Andrea Capucci, Pier Lanzillotta and Flavio Pacino – Costanza Battaglini. Not to mention the murals created by international artists as part of projects coordinated by the Rosso Tiepido association.
Bernardini works with spatial designs that cut through the emptiness between the buildings and impose themselves on the air as illusory forms. With the aim of transforming the site from a container for the work into an open and ‘permeable’ form, these are designs that are materialised by the physical light of the optical fibre through a free expressionism of space, drawing lines of light in the dark surroundings as negatively as on a dark sheet of paper. The idea of a living and not merely abstractly formulated space is the field of action that Carlo Bernardini has explored in recent years with a rigorous and analytical attitude, but also with a feel for the emotional components of a dynamic vision.
Bernardini works with unique systems of optical fibres, creating a shifting, illusory network of illuminated lines that traverse the space in different formations and geometries, challenging or upsetting the perceptual processes of viewers entering the space from inside and outside. He proposes a creative concept based on a code of spatial modifications depending on the changes caused by the light. This is confirmed by the current research of Carlo Bernardini, who treats light and shadow as materials and substances, using electroluminescent surfaces and glass fibres for external illumination in contexts of total darkness. These installations have viewpoints from which the forms can be seen in two dimensions, due to the visual superimposition of the initial geometric figures that cross the space with all the other lines that form the relative plastic structures along the surfaces of the space. As soon as you move away from this point, which is only visible when you close one eye as a kind of monocular lens, the resulting visual splitting of the lines is transformed, creating volumetric changes and mirror-image shapes. The first impression is not of optical fibres per se, but of transparent glass plates illuminated from the sides. Only in a later
The viewer can enter a kind of illusory space and experience the installation from inside and outside. In this sense, Bernardini develops an ability to see things within and beyond the strict constructive arrangement that encloses them, turning the geometric space into a theatre of events that move in the totality of the visual situation. It is clear that the viewer has an important function in this oscillation of light effects, his behaviour is directly involved in the path of the optical fibres, he can look at the image from a distance or from close up and articulate himself by following his own impulses. Each point of view becomes an integral part of the work as a whole; he can grasp the globality of the installation or approach its structure in order to grasp its details, its superimpositions, its fragments, even at the risk of losing sight of the whole. Bernardini’s work could be an attempt to see precisely this, the projection of space beyond the visible dimension. The shape of the space reconfigured by the optical fibre, the approach to reading the void through these new coordinates that shape the environment, can give us a glimpse of the ‘extra’ or invisible dimensions that elude our knowledge.
About the artist
Carlo Bernardini (Viterbo, 1966) lives and works in Milan, where he teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brera; he has been working with fibre optics since 1996. Exhibitions: XII Quadriennale di Roma 1996, 2002 installation for ‘Le città invisibili’ Triennale di Milano, Sculpture Space Utica (NY); XIV Quadriennale at Palazzo Reale Naples 2003, installations at Museo Paço Imperial Rio De Janeiro 2004; at Ciudad De Las Artes Y Las Ciencias Valencia 2008; at DUMBO New York 2009. 2010 Luci d’Artista Turin; La Scultura Italiana del XXI sec. Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro Milan; Sonic Acts at NIMK Amsterdam; Todays Art at Spuiplein in The Hague and at Art Light Domaquarée Berlin. 2011 MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art Rome; The Arc Show and the Kinetica Art Fair, University of Westminster London. 2012 FAD Funarte in Belo Horizonte; 2013 House Peroni London; Digital Life Macro Testaccio Rome; Submerged Breath at the Moselle Canalisée, Metz. 2014 4th Bienal del Fin del Mundo Mar del Plata; 17.
Islamic Art Festival Sharjah, Sharjah Art Museum UAE. 2015 Bienal de Curitiba at Museu Oscar Niemeyer; Pop Austin 2015 Austin, Milan Dobeš Museum Bratislava. In 2016 he exhibited at ‘La Porta di Milano’ Terminal 1 of Malpensa Airport and at 898 Innospace in Beijing. Instead, in 2017, the artist participated in the second Bienal Internacional de Asuncion, Significar lo Imposible, at UPAP, Asuncion, in the intervention Oltrelimite, for Effimera at MATA in Modena, in the work Suspended Space at Politecnico di Milano and in the installation for the exhibition Incorporeal Flicker, at the Wanlin Art Museum of Wuhan University in Wuhan. Instead, in 2018 he created large installations such as Impalpable Suspension, at the Green Man Festival Visual Arts in Breacon Beacons Park, Crikhowell in Wales, at the Contemporary Cluster in Rome, in Berlin for Extended Mind, at the Alte Münze and at the Reggia di Caserta. In 2019, he presented the large public installations Il punto dell’infinito at the Museum of Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Valmontone and Multiverso for the XXII edition of Luci d’Artista and Paratissima 2019 in the Piazzetta dell’Accademia Militare in Turin.
In 2020 he realised installations and sculptures in the Casa del Mantegna in Mantua for the Biennale of Light Art and in the Roman cisterns of the Palazzo Acquaviva in Atri (TE) for the VII Edition of Still of Peace Italy/Japan. In 2021 he had a solo exhibition at Palazzo Tagliaferro in Andora; in 2022 he was invited again to the Biennale of Light Art in Mantua at the Casa del Mantegna. In 2023, he realised the large site-specific installation Il punto dell’infinito (The Point of Infinity), which spanned the entire width of the courtyard of the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, and the intervention Light Levitation in Via Corsico in Navigli in Milan. In 2024, for Art City 2024, he realised The Light Cut, a dry light cut in the courtyard of Palazzo Bevilacqua Airoldi in Bologna.
WHEN?
Vernissage: Friday, 29 November at 6.30 pm
WHERE?
Comune di Castelnuovo Rangone
Via Roma 1
Modena, Italia
