Chronorama Redux,
Daniel Spivakov – 3rd Chapter
March 12, 2023 – January 7, 2024
Palazzo Grassi, Venice
The sweetness and void of celebrity, manifested in paint.
Daniel Spivakov presents the third chapter of his contribution to the exhibition Chronorama Redux at Palazzo Grassi, Venice. The three paintings show photographic images of young women, each painted over with a figure and abstract marks.
The figures are like ghosts; their white outlines hover over and melt into the image, haunting it as well as the viewer. Their mouths are opened, as if crying or yawning. Compared to the first and second chapter, the figures are more reduced and subtler. A silent cry it seems; there is pain, sadness, and façade.
The colours are also gentler compared to the previous chapters. Instead of poignant red, yellow, and turquoise, the paintings mostly come in black and white, some pink, apricot, pale yellow, and violet. It’s bonbons and death; layered, stacked, and stapled. A medicine plaster put on every wound; yet the cry pervades, filled up with sugar snow.
As with all of Spivakov’s contributions for Chronorama Redux, the photographs within the paintings stem from the Condé Nast archive. For the artist, the archive illustrates the emergence of a celebrity cult, the creation of personas. While the first chapter expressed a fight, the second was a moment of suspense, perhaps reflection.
The third chapter shows images between strass and hoodie, lipgloss and dirt, hunt and chase. A sweet suffocation, stacked sorrow; force and ennui.
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Chronorama Redux is accompanied by a catalogue featuring two essays by Daniel Kehlmann and Christina-Marie Lümen, and an interview between Daniel Spivakov and Julian Schnabel.