Christian Capurro



www.milanigallery.com.au/artwork/waste-breath-2

Milani Gallery in Woolloongabba has a windowless street frontage, a little imposing as to what’s behind a big solid door. As you enter from the street you immediately find yourself in a large featureless white walled room alone as any reception/office is tucked away out of sight. The room contains what on first impressions are wall mirrors, lots of them, big and small, some round, some rectangular. There are no wall texts or signs as to who or what it is so you are left to your own devices. All the mirrors have smears of a white substance that obstructs you looking at your reflection. Maybe this is what the work is about, you catch glimpses of yourself as you are drawn to look closely at the texture and pattern of the surface so you see these bits of your body and face as well as the congealed surface applied by the artist. Some applications are soft like the pattern your close breath might make on a cold day. Others are thicker abstract wipes and pools of dried substance. Progressing further into the gallery I find a catalogue that tells me the painterly application is actually correction fluid and varnish. Being different substances they don’t mix homogeneously giving rise to intriguing patterns a bit like looking at a snow covered landscape from a high flying plane.

The catalogue informs me that the artist is Christian Capurro, the exhibition titled Mouthpiece.  Individual works are titled Waste of Breath or Wastes(studios). Titles give the sense of a negative ambition, what is it all about?

It is a second upstairs small room that adds another clue in the puzzle. This gallery has no mirror works, rather individual pages of glossy magazines or more precise pages that contain only photographs, no text, brands, graphics or advertising. They have the same painted treatment as the mirrors, the clear varnish and white fluid smeared across parts of the image rendering large parts either translucent of blocked from view.  So mass media enters the story, it too obstructed. The slick photographic images typical of quality magazines have been desecrated, the intention this time might be to prevent the sort of pleasure or voyeurism we get from such images.

Thinking of the two gallery spaces together maybe the artist is questioning the nature of what artwork is about, first you the viewer (mirror works) form part of the image like it or not and secondly your viewing is deliberately blocked or more to the point your ability to read the image is obscured. Hence it plays with your mind and visual senses on both counts. We are not just innocent bystanders in consumption of images/artworks. 

Scott Avery