The Galleria Umberto Di Marino is pleased to present the first event of ten more ten, part of a series of exhibitions to be held throughout the year, designed to mark the tenth anniversary of the gallery in Naples and the twentieth anniversary of the first gallery founded in Giugliano in Campania.

The series of events held throughout Naples will involve the collaboration of several public institutions, as well as private owners and collectors who have followed the developments of the Galleria Umberto Di Marino closely over the years. The gallery’s artists or artists linked to it through longstanding relationships marked by lively intellectual exchange, will be involved in exhibitions designed for the gallery in via Alabardieri, as well as in installations, screenings, talks and site-specific projects for important sites in the urban landscape and the local cultural scene.

The themes that have always been at the heart of the gallery’s philosophy, such as social investigation using the landscape, an anthropological approach, travel and the geopolitical transpositions of cultural phenomena, postcolonialism and the failure of modernism, will be reinterpreted in a constant reworking of artistic contents and processes, culminating in the opening of a full-blown cabinet. Photos, archive documents, works, sketches, texts and letters will provide tangible evidence of the interplay of human and professional relations that lie behind the two galleries and support a concept of the gallery as a shared workshop of ideas and an open space for experimentation. Similarly, the invitation includes all the exhibitions held over the last ten years in a visual compendium and a heartfelt tribute to the traces left by the artists.

To mark the beginning of this cycle, Satoshi Hirose presents Heteronym, a substantial monographic exhibition in which the artist will display new works to the public, combining them with a reinterpretation of his past works. The result is the construction of a personal cosmogony that feeds off influences from both eastern and western thought.

“On a journey, the dialogue between myself and others seems to take place in a time that does not exist situated beyond the flow of time, to happen in a place that is not any place in particular. The journey proves to be a quiet space where the boundaries of identity of the ego become blurred and imprecise.” The artist’s words written for the text Identità vagante (“Wandering Identity”, 2007) reveal the close interrelationship between the encounter with different cultures and the complex definition of individuality and personal perspectives within a globalised society that is increasingly open to the contamination of languages. It offers an in-depth analysis of the dynamics of creativity in contemporary culture, enriched by strong philosophical references, which from the solo show Pas au-de-là in 2004 in Giugliano and the later show Microcosm in Naples in 2008, have inspired one of the fundamental fields of inquiry for the gallery’s research.

The title Heteronym, inspired by the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, provides an initial reference to the fluidity with which we create the continuous multiplication of identity within both real and virtual dimensions. By referring to the cognitive concepts of neo-platonic doctrine, the idea behind the exhibition tries to restore harmony between the microcosmos and the macrocosmos. The exhibition itinerary immediately takes the viewer into metaphysical space with Tama, the materialisation of the spirit in spherical forms, according to a meaning found both in Japanese philosophy and in anthropological studies and cognitive archaeology about ancient European and native American peoples.

The last room returns to the world of the senses and a changing perception of the world with historic works such as La casa del limone and Aperitivo (The lemon house and Aperitif) while the second room tries to trace an intersection between the two dimensions. Bean cosmos, for example, encapsulates the symbol of the poorest kind of material culture and the highest metaphysical reflection, male and female, contemplating the aspiration to erase time, space and every existing boundary between the self and others, between mankind and nature and between life and death.

Satoshi Hirose was born in 1963 inTokyo. He lives and works between Tokyo and Milano.