Deconstruction isn’t just something that happens to beef wellingtons on 'MasterChef'. Sometimes artists like to take things apart too. Young Italian duo Pasquale Pennacchio and Marisa Argentato’s installation feels in many ways like a walk through the disassembled components of a classical painting. It may be all metallic human forms, hovering plants, floating Orwellian eyes and digital calls to arms but the primary elements of classical art are all there.
The silver fragments of metallic legs and torsos that litter the floor act as the human element, the hovering orchids draped with metal tubing are still-lifes and sheets of crumpled digital colour on the walls are expansive landscapes. The two digital projections that hang in the middle of the room – a creepy, twisting, authoritarian eyeball and a pulsating sign saying that it’s ‘time to rise’ – are the emotional and conceptual bedrock of the piece.
Unlike the torn-apart culinary nightmares of 'MasterChef', this isn’t a total disaster – it really works. The duo are playing with ideas of representation, ownership and surveillance in the internet age. The orchids are ripped from their environment, their natural beauty framed by machinery. The classical forms of male sculpture are industrially replicated and mutated, like the failings of mechanical reproduction. And all the while, that eye watches your every step like a floating big brother.
Sure, it’s complex, net-influenced art, but Pennacchio Argentato cleverly manage to keep one foot rooted in visual culture, so that you’re never held at a distance. Invited into their sci-fi landscape, you’re likely to feel as creeped out as the artists evidently are. If big brother really is watching, this is a pretty great middle finger at him.
Eddy Frankel