Marsèlleria permanent exhibition presents Pure Disclosure (from April 10th to May 10th 2015), an exhibition by Alessandro Agudio, Daniel Keller, Andrea Magnani, and Timur Si-Qin, curated and produced by Siliqoon, an artistic production label based in Milan. Pure Disclosure is the result of a project that started out in 2014. Siliqoon invited the four artists to work side by side with selected companies, representatives of the Italian artisan excellence, hosted by Casa Natali/MAMbo, and Spazio Raum in a residence in Bologna.

This experience originated a corpus of works based on the artists’ individual research, characterized by a shared aesthetic sensibility and approach. The works appear as postcapitalistic products, presented following commercial promotional logics, thus creating a friction with their spiritual, critical, ironic nature. The space within Marsèlleria is made up of an itinerary which, between hybridization and disorientation, invites to a consideration on the mechanisms of visual culture and the related fruition criteria. Frozen in their antinomian substance, artifice and nature, marketing and culture are discerned and superimposed.

An analogy draws the involved crew together, proving a greater meaning beyond the sum of the parts: Marsèlleria, place of contemporary culture and domicile of Maison Marsèll, Siliqoon as art label, and Pure Disclosure as the outcome of a production incubation. The exhibited works recall the rethorical products of contemporary reality, globalized and interconnected, validated both by the communication strategies typical of a business context and by their own intrinsic aura, in contrast with the aspect of post-capitalistic consumer goods. Afterall isn’t the immateriality, the omnipotence and the fluidity of the internet from which the involved artists draw and to whose aesthetic they wink an almost divine entity? This metaphor leads back to the transparency of the production process which fully manifests itself through the whole project and that entails a perceptive disorientation within Marsèlleria. As a matter of fact the exhibited works overstep the common cosmetic exhibition approach although they iconically represent its universe. Through this alienation they therefore reflect the conception mechanisms of contemporary visual culture in its theoretical and consumptive paradoxes. Pure Disclosure stages a representation of indentifying rituals and shared narrations, and a reproduction of objects that hint at a part of the whole, forcing the observer to acknowledge it or to consider what he sees differently, taking a step towards the previous notion of objet trouvé. Four complementary elements that represent self-concience through speculative identifications, from the beginning of human history to the estrangement from its very own essence, and reflect the asymmetry of the nature of the synthetic, between actual and virtual, need and desire.

Alessandro Agudio’s work originates from the observation of social contexts and the relative lifestyles, typical of the 70s and 80s Western middle class, specifically in the North of Italy. This comparison with reality that surrounds us aims to the plastic abstraction of his artistic character: attentive to form and its potential lure made of colors and odours, the artist recreates polifunctional furnishing totems rich in details, posing as witnesses of possible interchangeable scenarios, familiar but aseptic. Interior design is deprived of its positivist charge, dissected and transplanted elsewhere, allowing the product to fullfill its dream of hybridizing with art. The outcome is an alien conglomerate of gimmicks. The original traits and features, like pastel colors and house music, still make it attractive but the platform connects and separates, and it becomes more and more estranged from its lost meaning. Agudio produced the new exhibited works in collaboration with Aida Bertozzi, Euromec di Archenti Mauro, Martino Tremolada designer, Nuove Residency, Serilegno and OMGB.

Daniel Keller has always been interested in production strategies and technological evolutions that condition progress and human activism. From his activity in AIDS-3D to the direction of Absolute Vitality Inc., Keller has explored the relationship between art, ecology, and economy, their geopolitical effects and the relationship between the corporations that take part in generating value. Essential element in his works is the filter of online and digital reality which exponentially amplifies every futuristic cogitation and diversifies the facedown generation through new original and autonomous languages.This kind of attention is revealed in the exhibition through a series of tagclouds weaved in technical sportswear material, already produced for DIS Magazine and exhibited here on panels and on mannequins. Furthermore, the displayed elements are in communication with live, organic material: the Spirulina Platensis. The exhibited works are produced in collaboration with Biotex. Styling: Ella Plevin.

In Andrea Magnani’s production each work is born and evolves as a startup in which the product’s design is altered kneading consumer and fruition logics with magical tradition. Similarly to Agudio, inorganic sensuality is emphasised and everyday objects are charged with inventive and narrative power. In this case, though, the iconical references refer to labs rather than their antechambers. Within this space, the ongoing rituals are frozen in a lived disarray enrichened by a brand identity where symbols are meant as architectural agents of the language, extensions of matter. What convalidates it all is the graphic choice, between corporate redundance and therapeutic reiteration, which, after all, is the subject of this hypothetical coulisse. Following researches on Mystical Urban Trekking this trasfiguration of matching athletic accessories reflects rituals linked to the well-being: the statement is ongoing. Magnani’s exhibited works are produced in collaboration with Bikun, Euromec di Archenti Mauro, Myver, and Fabric Division.

The focus of Timur Si-Qin’s works is the interpretation of every artifice as nature’s indirect product, therefore being its own element in all respects: reality is an entropic ecosystem with no distiction between nature and culture. According to this neomaterialistic conception, Si-Qin wonders about the relationship between objects and the story they represent putting in contact formally disconnected and distant concepts, able to establish a cross-sectional point of view. The artist creates hypercommercial environments dominated by oleographic advertising images able to trigger neural stimuli that translate to consumption. In common with work groups that have precedently portrayed stock images or conserved replicas of archeological artifacts, his work now translates into advertising displays. Leds and plexiglass frame the first, original Peace logo by Premier Machinic Funerary. Through 2014 the artist has developped various variations on this theme, tied by the lietmotiv of organic transience counterposed by the persistence of petrochemical (re)productions. Si-Qin’s works are produced in collaboration with Lualma Anodica, Pubbligraf and Studio Pedrini.

Timur Si-Qin (1984, Berlin) lives and works in Berlin. He worked with Pubbligraf (Faenza) and Studio Pedrini (Bologna). Selected solo shows: 2014 · Premier Machinic Funerary: Part II, Carl Kostyál, London; 2013 · Basin of Attraction, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn; Infinite Surrender, Focused Control, Société, Berlin; 2011 Mainstream, Société, Berlin · Legend, Fluxia, Milano. Selected collective shows: 2014 · Taipei Biennal, Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Refraction: The Image of Sense, Blain Southern, London; Dreams that money can’t buy, The Independent, MAXXI Museum, Roma; Art Post-Internet, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; 2013 · The Time Machine (Survivers), Frutta, Roma.

Daniel Keller (1986, Detroit) lives and works in Berlin. He worked with Biotex (Faenza). Selected solo shows: 2014 · eVita, Casa Maauad, Mexico City; 63rd-77th steps, Bari; 2013 · Lazy Ocean Drift, New Galerie, Paris; abc, art berlin contemporary/Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Selected collective shows: 2014 · Dis Magazine presents: DISown Shop, Red Bull Music Academy, New York; EXO #4, Exo Project Space, Paris; TEDxVaduz Redux, T293, Roma; 2013 · Speculations on Anonymous Materials, Fridericianum, Kassel; How Far Away Is Mars, T293, Roma; Liquid Autist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin.

Alessandro Agudio (1982, Milan) lives and works in Milan. He worked with OMGB (Imola) and Aida Bertozzi. Personali selezionate: 2013 · El Khaki (con Lupo Borgonovo,Fluxia, Milan; 2012 · Sleek Like a Slum, Gasconade, Milano; Ha-Ha (with Davide Stucchi), Plusdesign, Milan. Selected collective shows: 2013 · Collapse, Fluxia, Milan;Oltremare, Galleria Vistamare/Benedetta Spalletti, Pescara; 2012 · Fuoriclasse, GAM, Milan; Pose Position, Galerie 1m3, Lausanne; Carte Blanche #6: Il pittore che fuggiva il vento,Unicredit Studios, Milan; 2011 · After Prisma,Villa Romana,Florence.

Andrea Magnani (1983, Faenza) lives and works in Milan. He worked with SeB (Padova) and Pubbligraf (Faenza). Selected solo shows: 2013 · Hockety Pockety (con Giovanni Delvecchio), Spazio Swing, Benevento; 2012 · Sistema S, Nuovo - Palazzo Esposizioni, Faenza; Selected collective shows: 2014 · Atelier Bevilacqua La Masa: mostra finale, Galleria di Piazza San Marco, Venice; Desiderabilia, Via Ventura 6, Milan; Lira, Urban Center, Bassano del Grappa; 2013 · How Far Away Is Mars, T293, Rome; Trigger Party, Mars, Milao; 2012 · Always Lie, LONGINgaze - Stanford Housing, London; 2011 · 54° Venice Biennale, Chiostri di San Pietro, Reggio Emilia.