EVERYTHING DISTRACTS ME

GIOVANNI LEONARDO BASSAN

30 JUN - 30 JUL 2016

The Mine presented Italian artist Giovanni Leonardo Bassan in his second solo show, a pop-up exhibition in Paris where the artist is currently based.

Inspired by a two-month visit to a brand-new metropolis, this exciting young artist experienced the “big city” as a form of abstract meditation. In his eyes, the city became an encounter, a muse, a maker, and a benevolent machine. As the artist walks and breathes its days and nights, he is invited to surrender his sense of self, to hover over histories, to suspend his thoughts, to fight his fears, and to find new joys in its trembling streets.

Tired of the violence infecting our existence, the artist found that in the city his ideas no longer operated in a void. His sensitivity to his surroundings became fully present. He admired the city’s boundless energy and documented its faulty realities. He fell in love with the electricity of being. He understood the complexities of his freedom. He saw the darkness but embraced the light.

Driven by this current, Bassan responded in a new series of small format works. Temporal collages are formed through paintings, pencil drawings, and resins, using improvisational techniques influenced by the graffiti and spontaneous imagery of the streets, and shown alongside two pieces of photographic work. Each image is a search for its own fleeting life. The artist rejects the city’s distractions to find a deeper urgency. “By improvising I learn that contradictions are the clearest way to speak,” Bassan says. “Getting distracted by so many stimulations, and mostly by myself, I try to be here, right now.”

INSTALLATION VIEW