DE-MATÉRIALITÉ

The 59 Rivoli association, in collaboration with the City of Paris, welcomes the 3rd edition of the International Festival of Contemporary Mosaic in Paris, devised and curated by Luigi La Ferla.
This year’s edition is entitled De-Matérialité. The exhibition aims to demonstrate the beauty of the mosaic technique, which has been able to reinvent itself over the years, and which is capable of communicating with current social and aesthetic phenomena. Important European artists and representatives of the most prestigious mosaic schools from across the world will exhibit for this new edition, whose theme will be Matter. The materiality of the mosaic make this exhibition a true experience and a pretext to reclaim the three-dimensionality of art works, at a time when digital art is on the rise.

“Never before has the mosaic represented an expressive means capable of so effectively describing the contemporary era in its contradictions. The technical gesture of the mosaic artist in breaking down and reassembling the material is clearly a conceptual (perhaps unintentional) operation, in which the artist draws attention to an increasingly fragmented and individualistic society. The recomposition of matter in the final result obtained from the mosaic in turn translates a clear desire to bring together the pieces of a society increasingly affected by a form of digital neurosis.
The digital world is everything that humanity has managed to transpose from the real to the virtual through a binary numbering system, making the world editable and memorable.
This dematerialisation of reality has made everything more usable and lighter, simple and easy to consume. Current art embodies these characteristics through the use of a colourful, soft and two-dimensional aesthetic. In a nutshell, a work of art that does not create friction or reading difficulties generates an often ephemeral relationship with the viewer, I would say almost a feeling of softness and playful pleasure, like when one uses a smartphone.
The mosaic thus becomes the antithesis of this context. Its three-dimensional and material nature, its roughness and its hard forms immediately place it in an atmosphere of tactile and visual vibration, capable of generating high emotional satisfaction where the observer’s sensation is certainly neither an immaterial experience, nor virtual.
This exhibition’s ultimate goal is therefore to offer  a visual debate on the current state of the art, concretising solid presences, questions, contrasts and affinities through the mosaics on display and the guest artists.” (Luigi La Ferla)

The exhibition will be open from 23 to 26 November 2022.
Galerie 59 Rivoli, Paris