In his work, Riccardo Paratore deals with the art of display and art as a commodity and cultural signifier vis à vis identity-construction. Paratore’s exhibitions result from his intensive research into the field of design and its history, which he conflates with social climate and even personal history. By so doing, the artist aims to unsettle the distinction between the private and the public, objecthood and personhood. The artist posits that if self-design has become an integral part of socio-economic value production, then the biographical should be deployed as a point of departure. Such categories as kitsch, sentimentality, taste, and style become imperative in Paratore’s pursuit of the social subject at the heart of class mobility.
Recent solo and group exhibitions by Riccardo Paratore (b. 1990) include: Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2017), Federico Vavassori, Milan (2017, 2015), Édouard Montassut, Paris (2017), Park View, Los Angeles (2017),
Marbriers4, Geneva (2016), Fiorucci Art Trust, Monaco (2016), Kunsthalle Baden Baden (2016), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2014) and Kunsthalle Bremen (2014).
THE PROJECT AT GLUCK50
Installation view at Gluck50, 2018
Installation view at Gluck50, 2018
Installation view at Gluck50, 2018
Installation view at Gluck50, 2018
Installation view at Gluck50, 2018
Installation view at Gluck50, 2018
Installation view at Gluck50, 2018
Installation view at Gluck50, 2018
For his exhibition at Gluck50, Riccardo Paratore has collected and salvaged old artworks and objects from Hamburg, Los Angeles, Milan, and Paris, places that possess a biographical importance to the artist both from his childhood and young adulthood. These items are displayed in a series of mid- to large-scale clear acrylic glass containers. They include many personal articles, and also old works produced and exhibited in his still nascent artist history.
The boxes together operate like a storage system, structuring a closed circuit that frames the installation. The constituent items on view are packaged into clear, contained units that hypothetically can be stacked, placed next to one another, divided, or sorted according to size.
The boxes are in the business of aura management: producing it as they behave like precious candy boxes, upscaling all of the items on view, like in a shop display; destroying it by displaying them all on one shared field, creating an interchangeable effect between previously sanctified art objects and Paratore’s miscellany.
Producing a seamless whole through the space, the boxes flatten and even out any distinction between past and present time, generating a snapshot of what is immediate and available to see in the present moment. The artificiality of the sanctioned time of the exhibition is only heightened, with the Plexiglas system serving in this sense as both the envelope of the exhibition and the exhibition itself. (It is time to have a show).