Exhibition: La Vista del Tempo

Exhibition Palazzo Lazzarini Timetable 5 – 21 August 2007 PESARO – ITALY.

Paolo Mazzanti – Paul Statham LA VISTA DEL TEMPO an event of music and images Curator Victor De Circasia “attorno al festival” Rossini Opera Festival – PESARO The Perception Of Time La Vista Del Tempo By Victor De Circasia Art Curator Sunday, 23 June 2007

This event-project is about a contemporary fictitious world, an imaginary city. It should be looked upon as a child walking into a cathedral. The writer-composer Rossini was a powerful musical illustrator of contemporary life in his age and by all standards a visionary genius and here takes centre stage. Paul Statham is an author and composer of magnificent contemporary music. In 1998 he co-wrote ‘Here With Me’ and ‘I’m No Angel’ with then unsigned singer DIDO and then he co-wrote two songs with Kylie Minogue on her number one album ‘Fever’. In a little less than five years, Statham has produced some of the most engaging scores for our contemporary generation.

Paolo Mazzanti is a photographer who is a maker of imaginary temples, a type of circumstantial ‘castles’ of images inspired by nature’s reflection while simultaneously he is captivated with the new digital media. He has a philosophical approach to nature and explores the subject of composition and its architecture. With this project Victor De Circasia creates an imaginary world that is as much alive as our real one and, in the process; he demonstrated that the recitation of particulars and facts are not as important as the understanding of systems, structures, methods and context by absorbing the senses into a single experience. The exhibition opens 5th August in the frame of events of the Rossini Opera Festival (ROF) at the Palazzo Lazzarini in Pesaro. We should make it clear that in this art-event Rossini is much more than a classical composer, he is the source of inspiration and the draftsman or storyteller.

Using images from his personal research and his notebooks from which he works out his ideas Paolo Mazzanti presents a frame of work which Paul Statham has built upon and both try to unlock Rossini’s creative musical process. But the real surprise and pleasure is what we learn about the process of assembling image and music together. Throughout the making of this project its foundations are laid, the music and the photographs raise imaginary domes and arches which are suspended in the air.

To transcribe Rossini into contemporary terms is a huge task, as his music has already a contemporary flavour. His music has never ceased to amaze and move the audience with its energy and exuberance. The premise for making this contemporary work was the absolute autonomy of photographer and musician and the idea to disassemble the iconic skyscraper of this composer. The final result is the loving detail and notes of the written score. There is an obvious eerie quality to this fantasy of experience, again, as in Rossini’s work. The archaeology study, which played an essential role for Statham’s preparations of the imaginary ‘city’, is through the mysteries of looking into the way Rossini created his music, which begins with a challenge in creating a new composition without cancelling or extinguished the original creation. The project also follows the efforts of another contemporary archaeologist, Paolo Mazzanti who discovered the buried remnants of an ancient trial, which he assumes is a living matter and reinterprets the nature of creation. From that first conceptual position the familiar details of Rossini’s work are interpreted in expanding circles of image representation.

This is a project that becomes a sacred temple, a ceremonial place. A representation of truth beyond the simple visual or the musical pattern without the relics of a music culture that makes it contemporary and that will naturally become the central part of the exhibition. Vision plays multiple roles in this art work. A meticulous use of Rossini’s traditional compositions like: Andante e tema con variazioni (1812), Scherzo (1843), (William Tell) – 1829 and the Stabat mater are essential to the didactic value of the music and the ability to show us a three-dimensional relation of many parts. There are no exotic perspectives but a show that bounds into a kind of eternal city, literally as an ‘underground’ hidden world, which comes to view to draft the complexity of the structure of music and photography. Time is sped up (as we see towns and cities take shape over decades) and sometimes reversed (things are unbuilt or fall into decay). There is a free play with space and time which allows these artists to give a revealing perspective rendering an imaginary exhibition in which a collection of famous Rossini’s scores come to mind, from different places and historical eras that have been collected inside this exhibition.

Victor De Circasia has worked long and intensively inside what seems, at first glance, an elegant but fundamental illustration of assembling music and style. The ultimate perspective of his curator work is that of an artist who can play with nature, buildings, water, etc; it is that strange playful sense of power given by music and images to make and unmake a dream world; a power far more compelling than mere writing because it is immaterial, unlimited and not dependent on one single element.

To go as far as the near sense of the spectator to find the dissonance between how we see the world and how we actually perceived. To push the limits towards what we see and what we want. There is a compelling vision revealed in the Palazzo with this long-overdue contemporary intervention of contemporary work. They entertain, they teach, they provoke and they certainly succeed in their primary ambition, which is to make us look further into the contemporary world of Rossini as source of inspiration.

Some images from the exhibition