Being an animal of sorts ourselves, we enjoy spotting our fellow non-humans out and about in the art world. Artissima provides plenty, but these are a rather more knowing breed than we’re used to.
The role of the animal in the 21st century often appears to be boiled down to a few key cliches which are pushed throughout the mainstream web—the cutesy fluffball, popular with the Instagram crowd, the kooky weirdo, big with the memers, and the political poster child, good for the Peta patriots. But the real versatility of animalkind often feels best-stretched by visual artists, where it can take on an altogether more complex role.
A floor-to-ceiling work by Luis Lázaro Matos with Lisbon’s Madragoa is both funny and astute, placing long-legged animals in pretzel-like yoga poses, which, ironically enough, are known to take their cue from them—the Downward Dog, the Cat, the Cow, and so on. The group of birds, monkeys, giraffes and more are a far from anatomically correct conglomeration of animal and human forms, pert buttocks and elegant feet springing from snaky necks and coiled tails. Their eyes are all closed softly, their mouths in gentle smiles, as they mimic us, mimicking them.
In contrast, there’s a sadness to the beasts that sit around Sabrina Amrani’s booth, courtesy of Babak Golkar, at the centre of which is a red-eyed and slightly ratty fox, The Fox, The Nut and The Banker’s Hand, sitting on its hind feet holding an empty embossed tray. Its face has an air of judgement to it, the animal reduced to a position of servitude that it doesn’t entirely take on. Across the floor a chubby white pig sits innocently with a small grin on his face.
Perhaps a relative, Serena Vestrucci’s pig over at Sierra’s Fuoricampo looks a little more obviously troubled, his rusty-coloured shining skin and hollow black eyes drawing comparisons with the many heads you might find lining a butcher’s window—but for some reason, he pulls on the heartstrings a little more than those often do, so waxy and so potentially heart-wrenching that they tend to cause nothing more than a simple numbness.
Davide Monaldi’s line of painted terracotta dogs’ heads hanging from Studio Sales’s walls have a similarly blank-eyed expression, four in a row clinging determinedly to a long stick, their mask-like heads displaying a confusing mix of emptiness and menace. On the floor of the same booth sits Monaldi’s Banquet, a human form, reminiscent of a crime scene outline and made purely from breadcrumbs, surrounded by clay pigeons, pecked at hungrily but carelessly.
There are a number of small dogs at the fair–real life, strictly not for sale–who seem to have missed the memo, obediently trailing their owners from row to row.
‘Artissima’ runs from 4-6 November. artissima.it
