THE RULES OF THE GAME

Curated by Marco Scotini

Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani is glad to announce the first solo exhibition by Giuseppe Stampone at its own spaces of via Ventura. The exhibition, titled The Rules of the Game, will open on Thursday 21st of January, with a complex project created for this occasion.

More directly than in other interventions, the Milan Giuseppe Stampone’s personal exhibition declares the relationship between fiction and social reality as basics of his work. An inverse relationship, a constitutional dissymmetry that uses the fictitious element and the stage to unmask the capture strategies in which we are concretely caught. There’s always the will to reveal the dark side of the civil society behind the American-way keep smiling. Or, more in general, the necessity to accuse the sovereignty and hegemony forms behind the present idea of democracy.

The sets that Stampone creates try to invalidate, every time, the collective psychological certainties, the social roles pursued, the effectiveness of the devices we use. Recently, in Venice, he staged a real prefabricated house just finished and still surrounded by the scaffolding. The audience, asked out to get on the scaffolding, could see that, inside, TV images of rubble and ruins slid: those of the earthquake in Abruzzo, that is Stampone’s provenance.

But the parallel realities that Stampone builds, are not so realistic and dead convincing: they don’t demand to deceive anybody. They are not so disorienting for the spectator, who is also asked to take part in them. On the contrary, these installations let shine through their made by hand manufacture, show the temporary and precarious aspect, typical of the stage. They declare their characteristic of representing a copy and an image. Stampone is, in fact, a kind of toys manufacturer, he uses the same mechanisms of the entertainment to bare our media imaginations. At the end there’s always the character of Joker leaping on the stage, the smile of the Tim Burton’s criminal clown.

For this occasion in Milan, he decided to turn the gallery into a games room. And the subject is the gamble. Slot machines, chemin de fer and other recreational devices are there to put one or more players to the test, to invite them to challenge the luck. But the number coming out the throwing of the dices is not that coming from the chance, but that ruled by the bank that leads the game. The office of the gallery is turned in a little control tower supervising the players, while a movie inspired to Pasolini’s Salò works as a reflecting element of the scene: of the rules managing it. The game, as exploitation mechanism of the idea of luck and as agent of increasing addition, is not only the last possible dream of the late capitalism democracies. It’s also the last form of our relationship with what we call art.