The Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples is pleased to announce the opening, on Thursday 14 November 2024, of the solo exhibition by Tobias Zielony entitled Overshoot, which marks the return of the artist to the city.
The title of the exhibition refers to the latest series of photographs taken this year in Naples by the German artist and commissioned by the Museo Madre for the recent exhibition “Il resto di niente”, curated by Eva Fabbris with Giovanna Manzotti.
The distinctive gaze of Tobias Zielony, who already worked in Naples on the Vele housing complex in Scampia in 2010, focuses this time on the most significant places designed and imagined by Aldo Loris Rossi (1933-2018), the Neapolitan architect and theoretician - a radical in every sense - who often worked in close collaboration with the architect Donatella Mazzoleni. “The term ‘Overshoot’,” explains Zielony, “refers to the name of the radio programme broadcast on Radio Radicale on which Aldo Loris Rossi frequently appeared. It literally means ‘going past a set point, exaggerating, spending too much, etc.’. In the last few years, the term has been used to describe the exploitation by humankind of more resources than the Earth can sustain. This notion of excess, of going intentionally beyond what is reasonable and rational, could be used to describe the architectural vision of Rossi and Mazzoleni. The abundance of forms, the complex symbolism and love of futuristic ideas and forms led them to design and construct a series of truly unique and phantasmal buildings”.
The exhibition presents a rich selection of images and stop-motion animation from the “Overshoot” project. Tobias Zielony brings us face to face with some of Aldo Loris Rossi’s utopian works of architecture: the residential complex of Piazza Grande at Ponti Rossi, the Casa del Portuale in the area of via Marina and the church of Santa Maria della Libera e del Santissimo Redentore in Portici which, like other designs by the town planner (who died in 2018) were inspired, in terms of draughtsmanship, by the futurist Antonio Sant'Elia and, in terms of design, by the organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. These visionary designs have been re-examined by Zielony in their current social and urban context. Zielony’s vision follows the structures of the buildings and the movements of the people who inhabit them, giving rise to a seemingly infinite flow of possible images and perspectives. There is not just one way to look at architectural and social realities that continuously remodel themselves over time.
Zielony’s photographs all start from an investigation carried out in city suburbs and provide interesting combinations of architecture and portraiture. These habitats are no longer animated by an urban utopia and have become a type of ‘autonomous city within the city’. “I don’t want to create social reportage”, states the artist, who uses a narrative and visual approach typical of cinema, increasing the divide between reality and unreality, between what happens behind and in front of the camera lens. There is always a form of ambiguous and disarming beauty in the social hardship captured by the artist. Zielony’s subjective gaze, entirely lacking in sentimentality, teaches us to accept the world as it is, enabling everyone to have a voice. His photographs reveal but do not explain.
Special thanks to Sabato De Sarno and Gucci
