La Densità dello Spettro

Berger&Berger, 2012
Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome
curator : Marcello Smarrelli

The exhibition, entitled La Densità dello Spettro is a work on the material reality of colour (pigment, printing ink, industrial varnish, and so on) as counterposed to the immaterial nature of the constitutive elements of light waves like photons. Colour is in the different works on display interpreted according to the classificatory scheme created in the 19th century by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who developed a physiological approach to the subject that rejected pre-existing categories (created by Robert Fludd, Claude Boutet, Isaac Newton), but contrasted to what was to be developed a century later by Johannes Itten (which has determined the contemporary way of perceiving colour).

Sans titre, L'oeil humain
Berger&Berger, 2012
PVC colored adhesives. Dimensions variable. Protocol.

Walls
Berger&Berger, 2012
Siporex bricks. Dimensions variable.

White glazed
Berger&Berger, 2012
Micro-granules of glass, white paint. Dimensions variable. Protocol.

Mystère 79.24.15.00 - 04.96.79.01
Berger&Berger, 2012
Poster. 400 x 300 cm. Edition of 1.

Mystère was supported by the A.P.A (Advertising Postings Agency) of Rome, and printed in their facilities.

Sans titre, L'oeil humain
The three primary colors for additive synthesis are placed over the gallery’s sole bay window, thanks to which the space is naturally lit. Reinforced by electric lighting, the natural light penetrates into the space of the gallery and crosses through this inverted prism. Projected onto the walls, this light in association with the color filters progressively creates a synthetic white that is superimposed over the gallery’s white walls several centimeters away from the bay window.

Walls
Placed in the middle of the room, it occupies almost all of the space, leaving a small passageway for the visitor to walk around it. Walls is a minimal form of architecture set into another and into which one cannot enter.

White Glazed is an in situ intervention on the walls of one of the gallery’s rooms through the application of an industrial white paint mixed with tiny glass marbles. In contrast to the initial white conserved on the gallery’s ceiling and ground, the enhanced white constitutes a surface of reflection and diffusion of the gallery’s artificial light. The walls then function as a beaded movie screen, returning most of the light projected onto it back to the direction of its source, that of the spectator.
Paint is applied in the usual manner of a building painter.

Mystère initially spelled mistère (from medieval Latin misterium, "ceremony"), is a theatrical genre that appeared in the 15th century. It consisted of a succession of animated and dialogued paintings written for a very large audience, implementing stories and legends from which the imagination and popular belief had been nourished. Supernatural and realism rubbed shoulders there.
Mystère is composed by a series of thirty-six posters that each constitute a variation and combination of two complementary colors, opposite colors on the color circle defined by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Presented on the city’s advertising billboards, the posters display “altered” colors that present the color circle in an undefined way, through a progressive “slide”. An undetermined range of color successively affected by the digital production tool and the traditional procedure for printing in four colors referred to as CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key).