Chiara Dynys, Giovanni Rizzoli.

ARS FUTURA

This exhibition, entitled "La vie en rose," was dominated by the color pink--such a syrupy pink that one immediately understood that Giovanni Rizzoli meant it ironically, and that Chiara Dynys used it as an alienating effect. Rizzoli exhibited sculptures with a kinship to Surrealist objects, works built around derisive juxtapositions of incongruous images and materials. An extremely beautiful, white dormouse was shown next to an intravenous set-up, the needle driven into the fabric of the sofa. The purity of the period furniture was brutally stained by the blue ink contained in the IV, bringing the pictorial act back to a purely mechanical process with an irreverent basis. A desire for pure provocation was also evident in a display that held a Swiss banknote, like some sort of religious image. The third sculpture, Welt (World, all works 1992), was more subtle: on a foot-stool obtained from an antique shop, the artist placed a long strip of pink fabric that seemed to reject the entire world signified by the aluminum globe that pinned it to the floor.

The same subtlety was found in Dynys' wall installation, a work that was based on perceptual deception. A large number of small, pink, trapezoidal base-reliefs delineated a quadrangular form, within which other identical elements were casually arranged. This idea of order that contains disorder, or of a discrete structure generated by chaos, is associated with the impossibility of distinguishing one element from another, all elements being identical in size and color. But the viewer knew that some were made out of porcelain bisque, a material dangerously close to kitsch, and that others were cheap, plastic imitations. Yet one couldn't be sure about the difference, and the other piece--a larger, solitary base-relief in rosy Murano glass--offered no clues. Dynys' apparently neo-Minimalist impersonal work has a decidedly humorous streak: life is not pink; if anything, it is artificially colored, and it is full of deceptions.