SONG AND LOVE
Ola Vasiljeva and Matthew Lutz Kinoy
16 March 2018 – 4 August 2018
Curated by Supportico Lopez
At Indipendenza, Rome

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy and Ola Vasiljeva exhibit together for the first time in Rome at Indipendenza Studio. Invited by Gigiotto Del Vecchio and Stefania Palumbo of Supportico Lopez the artists conceived a project, that allows their individual practices to intersect through a sharing of space. Rather than a declared collaboration, the exhibition unfolds as a chorus of voices, where works move alongside one another and occupy the gallery with a natural sense of cohabitation.

Lutz-Kinoy and Vasiljeva have maintained a long standing dialogue through their shared involvement in The Oceans Academy of Arts where their practices have developed in close proximity and have often informed one another in subtle ways. This familiarity allows the exhibition to emerge less as a meeting point and more as a continuation of an ongoing exchange.

Song and Love reflects on the drawn documented lived and imagined space of music pleasure and memory. The title loosely echoes the film Un Chant d’Amour by Jean Genet in which two prisoners communicate through a straw pushed through a crack in the wall, sharing breath and cigarette smoke across separation. The gesture becomes a metaphor for the exhibition, where two artistic languages remain distinct yet circulate through the same atmosphere.

Both artists share an interest in staged environments and in the sensual charge of objects within them. In Vasiljeva’s work-- the exhibition takes on a scenographic quality, where narrative objects populate institutional and domestic settings and appear subtly altered through shifts of materiality and touch. Anthropomorphic lamps cast light over sculptures that echo the scale and intimacy of bar room interiors. These structures carry overlapping stories, performative traces and private references and place the viewer inside a stage that seems momentarily abandoned during an intermission.

Lutz-Kinoy introduces large format paintings that function as theatrical panels installed on the ceilings of the gallery like displaced frescoes. Their upward orientation draws the viewer’s gaze toward the architecture while Vasiljeva’s sculptures anchor the space close to the floor. Along the walls in adjacent rooms Lutz-Kinoy presents twelve ceramic masks representing the months of the year, assembled from thrown vessels that are pressed, layered and inverted into expressive faces.

Moving through the exhibition the works establish a sequence of tactile thresholds. Surfaces, textures and gestures travel from room to room suggesting a sensual passage, where each practice enters the territory of the other and the exhibition unfolds as a shared yet porous environment.