from Sign magazine
Saturday 4 February, as part of the project Know-how / Show-how: a geography of relations for Vision Systems / Reality Systems, opens Villa Pacchiani in Santa Croce sull’Arno“José Yaque, ”Arno Flood", curated by Ilaria Mariotti. The exhibition expresses the desire to reflect on the themes of sustainability in contemporary operations: on the life of objects and materials, on the idea of recovery, on the idea of waste as a representative of the identity of our territories and on these ongoing processes. A spokesperson for Cuban creative production on an international level, José Yaque will be one of the artists invited to exhibit within the Cuban Pavilion at the next Venice Biennale. At Villa Pacchiani, the artist presents two large installations specifically designed for the interiors and exteriors of the exhibition centre, a series of paintings and drawings created over the past few years, and a collection of previously unpublished drawings linked to this project.
"Know-how / Show-how, a geography of relationships for Vision Systems / Reality Systems”is the continuation of a journey strongly supported by the municipal administrations of Pisa and Santa Croce sull'Arno – and, in the first instance, by GALLERIA CONTINUA and Associazione Arte Continua, always interested in the relationship between art and territory and proponents of the need to involve artists in a process of reconsidering social issues – which began in 2013 and aims to build a model for intervention and connection between territories and international artists. This year, the project develops some of its characteristics to foster training paths, create opportunities for meetings and exchanges between students from Tuscan Academies of Fine Arts and José Yaque, an artist with a consolidated curriculum, with the aim of building an integrated system between the artist and young people in training for deepening themes such as, firstly, the identity of the territories, interpreted through productive and artistic excellence, production, resources, operational activities, and public-private collaborations. For this edition, the project's focus is on the Santa Croce sull'Arno area: the centre of excellence with which José Yaque is dialoguing and working closely for this project is Waste Recycling, a company within the Hera Group. A company sensitive to art and artistic practices, it is among the most important and qualified national companies dealing with the disposal of industrial waste and the treatment of waste materials from numerous production cycles.
During his stay in Santa Croce sull’Arno, José Yaque’s attention and sensitivity were captured by a series of elements that, in various ways, express certain substantial themes and, at the same time, relate to the artist's research. First and foremost is the presence of the river: always the same as an entity, yet constantly changing due to its incessant flow towards the sea. In the river, Yaque perceives the great metaphor that informs all his work, but which is, above all, the philosophical key through which he interprets the events of human life: one never bathes in the same river water because the water is always different, but also because the different moments in which we bathe see us in continuous evolution and change. For the artist, the only element of continuity in the history of civilisations is the continuous and unceasing flow of lives, always different and which are perceived in their being a people, being existence, being part of a whole that slowly, like the river, flows. For Yaque, changeability is the phenomenological element that is worth studying, analysing, and representing. Because everything changes, but the changing aspect is, paradoxically, what remains a constant characteristic.
In this interpretation, the experience at Waste Recycling was fundamental for building, through human activity, technology, and research, the visualisation of this metaphor: mounds of industrial waste sorted by material, which remain in storage areas for a short time to be continuously dismantled and reassembled by new arrivals. What remains from human activities is read, in its continuous breaking down and reassembling, as the incessant flow of a river, which speaks, at the same time, of human activities, consumption, and waste. The visit to the Aquarno purification plant and the treatment cycle, which returns water used by the tanning sector, purified, to the Usciana canal and then to the river, constituted a further piece for the artist in the construction and verification of an imagination centred on the circularity of the movement of things, water, materials, and energy. Likewise, further food for thought, which later coalesced around the image of “becoming”, came from meetings with representatives of the migrant communities that make up an important percentage of the population of Santa Croce sull'Arno, the history of the town, and the encounter with a leading company that works with leather destined for the luxury and fashion world.
The two large installations designed by José Yaque specifically for Villa Pacchiani, one outside, at the entrance to the Villa, the other for the central room of the exhibition space, encompass all these suggestions together. The idea of flow, of debris, of perpetual change, of the catastrophic event that generates a new form of beauty – all concepts that recur in the artist's research – materialise in the two installations that encompass the life of the river, the life and affairs of men. A series of paintings and drawings created over a period of several years and the result of different experiences are displayed within the exhibition space, occupying one wing. These are drawings and paintings belonging to two different series: one focuses on some portraits of bridges in different cities, the other concerns the vision of the role of art and its exhibition. The series of paintings and drawings themed on bridges was created in 2013 during residencies in London and Warsaw. Two cities crossed by rivers. The bridges connecting the two different banks are privileged points for observing the continuous flow of people parallel to that of the rivers. Effective observers for visualising metaphors about the movement and evolution of men and civilisations. Still in the same wing of Villa Pacchiani, a series of drawings (To become, all from 2014) show galleries of paintings, museums, where the exhibition structures are treated as a sort of bridge piers around which debris, branches, and objects carried by a flood accumulate and get stuck. This series of paintings and drawings mirrors, in a sign of continuity of the artist's research and actions, a constant flow of thought and visualizations, in a new core of drawings focused on photographic images collected in Santa Croce sull’Arno during the artist's stay, which is exhibited in the other wing of the exhibition space.
