RUDOLF STINGEL: Carpetizing the Palazzo Grassi in Venice
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What appears at first to be typical documentation of an exhibition becomes a collection of impressions that bring an unprecedented depth to surface. Rudolf Stingel: Palazzo Grassi 2013 presents the Italian artist’s largest installation to date: a wall-to-wall camouflaging of Venice’s 18th-century Palazzo Grassi with a synthetic carpet digitally printed in a blown-up red Ottoman rug design. Dotting the tapestries are 33 paintings by Stingel of both abstractions and photorealist ren- derings of carved-wood medieval saints and madonnas. One startling portrait of the artist’s friend Franz West, who died in 2011, looms over the Grand Canal from the Palazzo’s second floor.
Bending perception like few illustrated books can, the catalog takes Stingel’s 3D interplay of 2D mediums to the archival level, unfolding the artist’s psycho- analytic wormhole across more than 180 pages. “Anyone who has experienced Stingel’s installations has felt the impression of being levitated above the floor, of becoming detached as much as of taking off, which transports us without moving us and disorients us even though we are familiar with the places in question,” writes Jean-Pierre Criqui in the catalog. Close-up images reveal the pixelated carpet in contrast with the sharp eeriness of the paintings, which linger in the architecture like the black holes of art history. The balanced perspective of the Venetian Classical style is trumped by the wainscotting rug, and the architecture’s values of symmetry are dazed. An oversized tome of human proportion, the catalog is a visual manual on how to change the “here” into elsewhere.
Rudolf Stingel: Palazzo Grassi, Published by Palazzo Grassi, 2013
