Salvatore Arancio. Like a sort of Pompeii in reverse

From 11 July to 22 September 2019 Jorn House Museum of Albissola Marina (SV) presented the solo exhibition of Salvatore Arancio: Like a Sort of Pompeii in Reverse, an unpublished and site specific project, designed and built on site.

Between 2017 and the 2019 Arancio has made numerous research visits and several inspections at Casa Museo Jorn, fascinated by the situationist labyrinth that the Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914-1973) created between 1957 and the 1973 together with his friend and assistant Umberto Gambetta (Berto).
More than any other aspect or place in the house, Arancio was struck by the multi-material and pseudo-organic concretions made by Jorn and Gambetta in the garden, in which he glimpsed not only the poetry of the inventive game, but the imaginative and creative potential of what cannot be seen. The artist has therefore started experimental research, based on modeling clay directly on the shapes, on the surfaces and volumes of the garden, plastically detecting the negative and thinking about what is not seen but exists only in potentiality.
Orange focused in particular on the many elements of uncertain origin (natural or artificial) and of ambiguous and ironic authorship (Jorn o Gambetta), to establish a relationship of continuity in the discourse initiated by Jorn on metamorphosis and imagination; a dialogue that develops from the language of ceramic sculpture, common to both Jorn and Arancio, and based on the complicity and collaboration of genius loci: the local artisan shops. […]
During construction, during the frequent occasions of confrontation between artist and curator, the title of the exhibition was born: Like a Sort of Pompeii in Reverse is in fact a quote from the text that Guy Debord wrote in 1972 for Jorn's book The Garden of Albisola, created by Ezio Gribaudo for the Fratelli Pozzo Art Editions of Turin and published posthumously in 1974.
Arancio therefore proposes its own vision, which appears to have more than one contact with Debord's interpretation of Jorn's garden. What for Debord was the situationist result of Jorn's architectural experience, for Arancio it is the possibility of imagining shapes, the volumes and surfaces of the garden as casts of a space in the making, initial matrices born from the indistinguishable combined action of time, of man's work and chance. The sculptures created from this starting point first experienced an integrated dialogue with the spaces of the garden, after which they were placed inside Jorn's studio, in special filing cabinets that are offered to the visitor's analytical gaze, as archaeological finds of an invisible imaginary universe.

This volume, edited by Luca Bochicchio and published as a supplement to and at the end of the exhibition, includes in its first part the text of Guy Debord and four short fictional texts by Stella Cattaneo, Diego Drago, Daniele Panucci and Alessia Piva. In the second part the texts of Luca Bochicchio and Paola Nicolin critically approach the work of Salvatore Arancio.