Summer is Almost Gone
The new site-specific project by Bianco-Valente for the PAC - Port of Contemporary Art of Acciaroli emphasizes the importance of retaking the reins of the present.
It acts as a kind of visual plot or luminous sign in the city (meeting place and thoroughfare for citizens), a temporary action of contemporary art that directly affects the heart by combining life and imagination in all aspects of existence, to give us the simplest elements - in some cases inexpressible - of human relations.
The theater for this new adventure is the Norman tower of Acciaroli (called “Cannicchio”, from the name of the feudal lord), where the distant lights make the sea a mirror. More precisely this refers to the wall facing the central square lying on the Tyrrhenian coast, beside the Church of the Most Holy Annunciation. On the wall marked by the sun and the years, the neon writing Summer is almost gone shines like a summer lighthouse, a metaphor of a sought-after and indispensable optimism.
Bianco-Valente's escapes once again from the closed and lacquered spaces of the gallery and the simple museum to dive into everyday life, to deal with people, to touch the voix du silence (Malraux), to gamble with the capacity of the human species to invent and live new relationships, to experience still unknown emotions.
The audience of the artwork is, in this case, the one distracted by everyday life, the one who comes out of the house in a rush to do little errands or that in the afternoon and in the evening gather in the square to celebrate. It is a community that stumbles pleasantly upon the words and rediscovers the vertigo of reflection: because a Bianco-Valente artwork, whether permanent or temporary, is always an epiphany, an indelible trace, a lively and vivid memory. Almost like a vital slogan, Summer is almost gone is an eloquent synonym of a widespread feeling of illness that has existed for some time in international artistic circles, pushing artists to seek a more sincere comparison with the social reality and the contradictions of the present. But it is also, and above all, "a hymn to life, an invitation to enjoy every moment of one's existence" (Bianco-Valente).
With an informative essentialism that goes to heart of public problems, questions and needs, this new project is a message and a massage that aims to awaken the vitality of society. It is also a moment of common experience, a mediating function whose plasticity intervenes directly and effectively in life to generate active participation, restore a lost communion, an emotional fusion.
These four luminous words chosen by Bianco-Valente are in fact, in the warm yellow light of the evening, a poetic vision that brings together a community, an engagement that involves history (that of every single spectator and that of the species), a sketch of a concept able to reveal everything about our existence in the world, an evolutionary vision that is linked to the clarity of origins: that is, a life lived and appreciated because it is precious, which must be caught in its irresistible and fragile transience.
Text by Antonello Tolve
