Michele Bubacco, Jürgen Klauke

Through liquid Mirrors is both an allusion to the shimmering, mutable surface of the Venetian lagoon and a metaphor for the evocative interplay of perception and interpretation within the artists’ works. Like the fluidity of water, which resists containment and constantly shifts its form, the practices of these artists elude definitive categorization, each exploring a unique visual language that reflects and refracts the world in multifaceted ways.

Cristiano Tassinari’s (Italy, 1980) paintings and installations at first view can appear sunny and cheerful, at the same time they tackle crucial political and autobiographical subjects. His works bring to light how representations and symbols can erode the immediate pleasure that is experienced when first viewing the image, show the documentation of its self-generation, bring to attention simple everyday commodities, such as little bird sculptures collected by his mother. The mixture of art and sociology constitutes one of the characters of his art-making. (Apparently) different paths lead to the same end: the intention to transfer private emotions into a public area, to spread awareness of the universal value of certain topics, such as death or human frailty.

Erin O’Keefe (US, 1962) is a photographer and an architect, and her work is informed by both of these disciplines. The artist’s background in architecture is the underpinning for her art practice, providing her first sustained exposure to the issues and questions that she contends with in her photographs. The questions that she asks through her work are about the nature of spatial perception, and the tools that she uses are rooted in the abstract, formal language of making that she developed as an architect. As a photographer, Erin O’Keefe is interested in the layer of distortion and misapprehension introduced by the camera as it translates three dimensional form and space into two dimensional image. This inevitable misalignment is the central issue in her work.

Since the 1970s, Jürgen Klauke (Germany, 1943) has been concentrating on the human body and its gender identity in photographs, video works and performances. He radically queries conventional gender roles and analyses their social conventions and constructions. In staged settings he deconstructs current sexual typologies and their effects on identity and subject. In the paper drawings on display, simple lines form naked figures whose sexual organs and body parts fragment into organic abstract forms. Klauke’s suggestive works on paper present the human body as a transformed object. Complex scenes seem to be erotically charged without sexual acts being visible. Instead, they show metamorphoses of the sexual.

“Pictorial Metabolism” is the eccentric lexical invention with which Michele Bubacco (Italy, 1983) defines his conceptual, excessive and radical artistic method. The Venetian painter sees the metaphorical meaning of this analogy between painting and the human processes of food intake and digestion in the fact that painting also perceives everything it encounters as something usable, and that it also needs a continuous supply of visual impressions to maintain but also to develop itself. The painter also continually expels the products of his unconscious visual fantasy, as well as his traumatic-pulsional ideations. All this, however, is expressed in the form of a continuous becoming, so that the thought that the artist may have already concretized at the beginning of his creative work, is sometimes transformed through the spontaneous comparison with obsessive imaginings and with the formal self-realizations of the pictorial process, and in the end something unexpected appears where originally something else was sought.

While the artists’ practices diverge, the works collectively evoke a sense of shifting perspectives and an elusive nature of meaning. Together, they form a constellation of visions that, like the reflections on Venetian waters, are in constant flux—ephemeral, ambiguous, and endlessly compelling.
Together, the artists create a dynamic dialogue within the gallery, reshaping our understanding of the spaces we inhabit, both physical and imaginary. The exhibition becomes a liquid mirror itself, reflecting and refracting the unique visions of its contributors and the context of Venice.