2. Laure Prouvost COLLEZIONE MARAMOTTI Via Fratelli Cervi 66, 42100 Reggio Emilia collezionemaramotti.org Farfromwords: car mirrors eat raspberries when swimming through the sun, to swallow sweet smells is a two-part installation by London-based artist Laure Prouvost, currently on view at the Maramotti Collection in Reggio Emilia until November 3, and previously exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery. Prouvost was shortlisted for the Turner Prize this year, and was awarded the previous Max Mara Art Prize for Women, which is connected to a six-month residency in Italy. This period, divided between Rome and the Pistoletto Foundation, in the countryside near Biella, was a point of departure for the investigation that plays out in the show at Maramotti. A collection of images, experiences, sensations and narratives acts as notes in a spontaneous concert of storytelling, arranged over various parts of the installation. Inside the exhibition space, a circular architectural structure envelops the viewers, serving at the same time as the frame for a series of drawings, paintings, collages and videos that together constitute a landscape of Italian memories, epicurean pleasures, and sensual experiences. The surreal panorama is composed of a colorful mix of bodies, trompe-l’oeil depictions of vegetation and architecture, columns holding monitors, painting references and symbols. As in many other installations by Prouvost, the settings that she creates are physical reinterpretations and transpositions of her videos. In one of her most ambitious pieces, The Wanderer, a video transposition of a Roy Macbeth text that is itself a translation of a novel by Kafka without any knowledge of German, Prouvost also created engaging environments that work as a stage and interference between the realm of fiction and the actual. Prouvost often investigates the fragile nature of narrative in her works by overlapping different languages. The sculptural and architectural elements of her installations seem to become traces of the performative actions that animate her videos. In Wantee, an installation realized this year at Tate Britain, the recreation of a intimate environment again brings the viewer inside the work’s narratives; the audience is even invited to have a cup of tea served in honor of Prouvost’s fictional grandfather, called “Wantee” – a play on words – who is a close friend of Kurt Schwitters’. Here at Maramotti, the big structure becomes a prelude or a tableau vivant for the video. Opposite the entrance, a dark room contains Swallow: the main work and the core of the installation, already anticipated by monitors located over the structure that serve as an introduction, preparing visitors for their plunge into the sounds and images. In the video, idyllic scenes of naked women bathing in a river are mixed with short glimpses of scenes captured during her stay in Italy: fruits, trees, flowers. Prouvost’s practice questions communication through both images and words. Incomprehension, misunderstanding and incorrect translations activate her works, allowing them to explore and open up new meanings. Shallow is a similar attempt to translate a physical sensation to video. A sensual experience is translated to a different order of representation. As Prouvost has said, she wanted to recreate the pleasant sensation of the sun on her face. Perceptions and thoughts collide through the rapid editing of the footage. The rhythm of the images is articulated by the sound of breathing, intensifying into a visual orgasm. The narration, too, is fragmented, as the artist’s voice whispers directly to the viewer, describing the games of the nymphs that inhabit the playful, sensual scenes in the video. Fragrant fruits are offered to the viewer by sculptures hanging on the walls. The sensual and sexual references are quite explicit: flowers in bloom, fishes that steal ripe raspberries, audible moans. The vision staged in the movie is a confluence of references from art history, from Cézanne ’s Bathers and Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe to the erotic paintings of Pompeii, and the sensual experiences of a paradisiacal Italian landscape. The installation could be described as a personal reinterpretation of the Grand Tour, an educational rite of passage, which here becomes the discovery and investigation of experience through pleasure. (Text by Guido Santandrea) .