“Clapis is interested in the figure and idea of the artistic personality, on the edge between art and life. His work is largely inscribed in those practices marked by Conceptual Art and Performing Art, bringing into play the limits and human frailties but also the unexpressed and little-known possibilities of this condition”
On the occasion of the Federico Clapis’s solo show “SPAZIO MENTALE = AMBIENTE”, in the spaces of BIANCHIZARDIN CONTEMPORARY ART, curated by Marco Tagliafierro, the publication “Alla fine del sogno c’è un’arte meravigliosa. Viaggio nell’arte di Federico Clapis.” (i.e. “At the end of the dream there is a wonderful art. Journey into the art of Federico Clapis.”), the first editorial project curated by THAT’S CONTEMPORARY in collaboration with CIV and BIANCHIZARDIN CONTEMPORARY ART.
The book, printed in a limited edition of 150 copies and presented in the evening of October 5th 2021 at Casa degli Artisti in the presence of Federico Clapis, contains unpublished photographs and texts of the artist and the works exhibited, as well as a conversation held with the gallery owner Andrea Zardin and the texts of the curator Marco Tagliafierro, who, “in the compulsive research of Federico Clapis”, allows us to take a real journey into the depths of his imagination, showing nuances and intimate aspects, unpublished and unexpected.
“He succeeds in transforming ordinary situations, archaic situations, dead idioms, elements directing mental rebound, into formal facts, even into decorative factors. He realizes complex interventions, full of conflicts, of hermetic and ritual evocations, of magic meanings, creating an acute relationship of energetic and emotional tension through signs and colors, managing, however, to reach a subtle, underlying, poetic charge.”
A series of sculptures, installations and video-installations, the result of the production of Clapis in the last two years and that we are invited to interpret as archaeologies of the future orm avantgardes of the past, utopias or retrotopias have constituted the fulcrum of the exhibition ” SPAZIO MENTALE = AMBIENTE “, which ended on October 16 2021.
With the project “Alla fine del sonno c’è un’arte meravigliosa, Viaggio nell’arte di Federico Clapis.” CIV embarks on a journey to promote contemporary art and artists, perceived as bearers of a philosophical knowledge to be passed on.