Albert Camus

FIONA BANNER : KICKING THE WEIGHT OF LANGUAGE

Fiona Banner    time, the anti-hero

at 1301PE 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

November 2025 – January 2026

The artwork gives a body to an intellectual drama. Our thinking gives up with prestige accepting to be nothing more than intelligence making appearances visible and covering them with images that don’t have reason to be.  If the world was clear, art would not exist.

Expression begins where thinking stops. 

ALBERT CAMUS. From Le mythe de Sisyphe, 1942

Dis-like, dis-quiet, dis-member, dis-traction, D I S, the 3 (greek) letters that have lived hundreds years and found a place in many languages of today, give the words a strange uncertainty: DIS ARM for instance, it’s an arm and it is not. Fiona Banner decided it is the arm of a clock. Time is gently held inside the hand, it’s human time. As the arm moves around invisible hours the human touch replaces certainty. Time is not written. Movement, inner timing, the unpredictable, surprising clock in our body hosts an infinite shrinking, or enlarging time, the son of emotions. Silent and invisible. Not a hero. 

We all are, including the artist, prisoners of languages that we love and dislike. 

They are a constant challenge. Words are the most tricky. On paper they slip away fast. If we stop on them more than a few seconds each word becomes a deep hole, understanding goes to hell. Paul Valéry showed me that. But placed on the floor cast in industrial fonts — using melted aluminum that was once the wing of a jet attack aircraft originally used by the British Royal Air Force and the French Air Force — the surviving word, V U L V A, becomes heaviness, sculpted mixture of meanings; an object, an absurd object in our face. 

As I look down between my legs, I feel my vulva — the delicate architecture of the porch to my sexual life: a soft, flexible, humid and warm system of lips — falling down to be transformed into a metallic word. What language does. The common usage of it. In her countryside wisdom my grandmother used to say, bathing the child me, that my butterfly needed care and constant cleanliness, because it was my second face. Another usage of language. 

 V U L V A :   Fiona Banner exposes the hard core of this word : there is no way out. She is right. And I thank her, because feeling the vulva pulsing in me I do know it’s an unwritten fairy tale. The artist also must have felt the harshness of the metal. She added her own feelings in graphite on paper with soft, nuanced images. VULVA is barely readable, absorbed into a cloud of gray. 

But my mind surprises me. She starts dancing, my camera moves around the still word on the floor: yes, upside down, diagonal, with Brian’ s feet, without, how much time is congealed in it, devoured by language. Not a hero. 

Camus wrote that the artwork comes from intelligence giving up: art is “the triumph of the carnal. Clear thinking gives rise to it, yet in so doing abandons its claims.”

The whole exhibition dances around me, pieces of body painted, or thrown in the air for a video. The scene is completely separate from the earth, only clouds and the blue of the sky. Real pieces of a plastic mannequin dance among the clouds apparently having a lot of fun. No AI, no 3D computer graphics. Feet, hands, head, hair, and a bust with only one leg, don’t seem destined to come back to the ground. A headless, painted feminine bust floats on the canvas upside down. ORCHESTRA is written over the breasts. 

We are so imperfect that we can’t even be always unhappy, wrote an old French guy. Art makes no exception. 

I walked out of the gallery thinking of writing as a crazy dance picking ideas from everywhere, and moving them in a smiling, displaced, imaginary conversation with the artist. I can’t avoid thinking that in music, and rhythm, time is a hero. 

Rosanna Albertini

Fiona Banner, time, the anti-hero, 2025, Mixed media, mannequin arm, paint, clock mechanism, electrical components, 57″ diameter

Fiona Banner, VULVA VOLVO (2021 now), 2025, Aluminum from Sepecat Jaguar XZ118, 63 v 6 x 4″

Fiona Banner, Vulva Volvo (2004-2012), 2025, Graphite on paper, aluminum from Tornado ZE728, glass, 16.5 x 31.5″

Fiona Banner, Obsolete, 2025, oil on canvas, 7 x 5″

Fiona Banner, Recto, Verso, 2025, Oil on canvas, 7 x 5″

Fiona Banner, Orchestra, 2025, Oil on canvas, 7 x 5″

FIONA CONNOR : Corpses For Dry Eyes

 

FIONA CONNOR, Closed Down Clubs, 2018 Mix media installation at The MAK Center, Los Angeles

 

FIONA CONNOR: CORPSES FOR DRY EYES

text by Rosanna Albertini    

    Photos by Peter Kirby

From far, they look like vertical pages separated from their book, pages that thickened enough to stand up in an empty space. They are the last page of different volumes. Volumes of a time that was. 

Glass and wood and metal might have absorbed over decades after-shave perfumes, coffee steam, and smells of sweat, garlic, burned bread, beer, whisky and bad breath — “better bad breath than no breath at all,” sings Willy Nelson. That’s just me, I have a strange system of senses: enough to think about a crowded bar, I can smell it and absorb the cigarette smoke blending with the car exhaust on the sidewalk. All gone now. 

But the sculptures in person still carry the hidden volume of stories moving through the doors open or closed, by the years in numbers.

Fiona Connor remade the vertical, thin bodies as they were their last day of work, after opening and closing for people in search of food, drinks, music, eager to clasp hands, or lost in rage. She couldn’t reproduce the secret feelings each geometrical guardian shared with the fingers touching them, pushing or pulling. Music could do it, not visual arts. 

Remade, opened to a new life in spaces for art, usually neat and aseptic like hospital rooms — surgery happened for sure — the inanimate guardians move in a limbo, following the uncomfortable translation into a body of language: walls and ceiling disappeared, as well as the address. The remains are a calligraphic profile.

It’s a day filled with smog and smoke in Los Angeles. My vision might be blurred, but I see Fiona Connor putting together little by little faithful archival alter-egos of the original architectural elements, adding handwritten signs, eviction notices, other messages to the public, as a spider does secreting the thread for geometrical webs. And I see Allan Ruppersberg rewriting in a perfect copy on canvas the whole text of The Portrait of Dorian Gray. 

As their own life goes through the time of building and making, the two artists become one thing with the process.  Once their work is done, “reality slips away from them because she is real again, and marks a distance.” Albert Camus. “Such thickness and strangeness of the world is nothing but absurdity.” They both deal with a reality which is thick and quaint; in a word, the absurdity of the physical world, which is a primitive substance refusing dominion: humans made it their own only to toss it, or forget.

Eh bien, voilà. That’s the art. To feel the growing power of natural or cultural blocks, stronger than dragons, and fight against them, or move away. Apparently protective, historical frames keep at bay any wish to move out, far from them, from their mask of permanence, even from their beauty.   

THE WALLS DON’T FALL, wrote Hilda Doolittle in 1944. One year before I was born. She was born in Bethlehem, PA, in 1886 and died in 1961 in Zurich.

XLIII

Still the walls do not fall,

 I don’t know why;

there is wrr-hiss,

lightning in a not-known,

unregistered dimension;

 we are powerless,

dust and powder fill our lungs,

our bodies blunder

through doors twisted on hinges,

and the lintels slant 

cross-wise;

we walk continually

on thin air

that thickens to a blind fog,

then steps swiftly aside,

for even the air 

is independable, 

thick where it should be fine

and tenuous where wings separate and open

 

XXXVIII

my mind (yours),

your way of thought (mine),

each has its peculiar intricate map,

threads weave over and under

the jungle-growth

of biological aptitudes,

inherited tendencies,

the intellectual effort

of the whole race,

it’s tide and ebb;

but my mind (yours) 

has its peculiar ego-centric

personal approach 

to the eternal realities,

and differs from every other

in minute particulars,

as the vein-paths on any leaf

differs from those of every other leaf

in the forest, as every snow-flake

has its particular star, coral or prism shape. 

 

Like Hilda Doolittle, Fiona Connor is a voyager, a discoverer of the not-known and unrecorded. She has no map, nor rules of procedure. How could she bring to us the death of these social spaces without knowing what death is? She made a flat coffin for each of them, a profile. “I must find out what is moving inside them that makes them them, and I must find out how I by the the thing moving excitedly inside in me can make a portrait of them.” (Gertrude Stein) There is no way in, no way out. But they are strongly anchored in the floor, solitary skeletons offering their nakedness to the viewers, with no regrets.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, Paris, Gallimard, 1942

Revolution of the Word, editor Jerome Rothenberg –a new gathering of American avant garde poetry 1914-1945, New York, The Seabury Press 1974.

 

EWERDT HILGEMANN : BEAUTIFUL RUINS

 

LA CARESSE DE L’ARTISTE

by Rosanna Albertini

Ewerdt Hilgemann: “I’m full of stories, they sit everywhere in my whole body.”

(From a conversation with Klaus Altevogt for metalligent, May 2017)

He had a solo exhibition at Royale Projects, Los Angeles CA, in 2017

It would be exciting to know how exactly each cell, each molecule, each organ reacts to stories and physical realities every time they grab our attention. They become a part of us whether we invite them or not. Here we have an artist born in Germany in 1938 who grew up among bombs and marching boots in the Ruhr area, and had the fortune of having grandparents in countryside, where for a while he enjoyed nature and the experiments on different materials in a cement factory where his grandfather was director of a laboratory. Strange objects fell from the sky. They ruined the hands of his best friend. Half of the house was destroyed. Ewerdt experienced a hostility conveyed by objects, but originated by humans. It takes a long time to find a personal answer to these kinds of absurdities.

I don’t know how he made up his mind. It’s a fact that, in 1982, Hilgemann made what Camus would declare the perfect absurd piece: The Rolling Cube. From Camus’ standpoint, it’s a compliment. Ten tons of Carrara white marble, a cube whose faces were polished by the artist for weeks, soft like a skin he caresses, gently, at the end of the work, is carried on a truck to the top of the mountain. And thrown down the ravine, to become again a broken splinter of the mountain. After the fall though, it is different from the other fragments of rocks throw down by the quarry workers: it had been sculpted. The whole action was filmed.

The caress: “The caress is the waiting for a pure time to come, time without a content. She is made with growing hunger, and more and more enticing promises, something that brings new perspectives on the things we cannot grasp.” (Emmanuel Levinas, Le temps et l’autre)

I was struck looking at the solitude of the artist and the rock during the physical transformation of the piece of marble. “I had to do it,” says the artist, and not for fame or money. He paid for the cube. In exchange, I would say, he became an anonymous field of existence. The cube had to be perfect, and meaningless. There is past in the men, as well as in the object’s material nature, but the object will not have the time to remember, it will be dead in a few minutes, leaving to the artist a beautiful ruin. Ugliness and pain of an inhuman history, its thickness, the smell of war, along with impenetrable political decisions, still heavy like a storm of memories, were persuaded for a very short time to get in touch with beauty. Like Marie Antoinette climbing the scaffold. It won’t last.

Maybe the present starts there for the artist, his own journey free from the weight of the past. Returning to himself, the artist is chained to Ewerdt as never before. He is finally in the present. “C’est un présent d’être et non de rêve.” It’s a living present, not of a dream. “The present has shredded the texture of the infinite existing; history is ignored; the present starts from right now.” (Emmanuel Levinas, Le temps et l’autre)

In the art that came after killing the cube, a sense of damage remains that Michelangelo, Bernini, even Camille Claudel, couldn’t conceive. After so many proofs of destructive power among humans, how could artworks remain untouched? Hilgemann sculptures succeed in being beautiful despite the distance and the separation the artist has organized between his hands and the shape that appears. He prepares a regular volume, connects a pump to the inside of the piece, and waits for the implosion of the form, while little by little the extraction, almost an abduction of the air, produces shrinking, moaning, strong noise at times, for the art body has to be born by himself.

In Europe the beginnings of conceptual experiences in the arts were quite different from American conceptualism. The finitude of the object must pay a price to a very diffused state of mind still disturbed by real ruins and graveyards facing the permanent, immutable natural splendor. There was need “to make violence to the present, forcing art (for instance) to reach levels that are beyond the concept of art. Vincenzo Agnetti. “ Intuition is conscious reality bumped in the dark.” 1970

And Hilgemann’s sculptures of today, with their unsteady balance, deformed as if they had been pinched by invisible inner demons, show their imperfect body with pride, they are so human one can only sympathize with them. Does your heap hurt? Are you strangely bent? Look at me, they say, my odd angles will never change. And I did it by myself. Like you, isn’t it? Yet, they also express care, and a secret determination of the artist to give at least a direction to their taking form. ‘Conceptually,’ I don’t know if it is the proper word, their luminous charm emanates from the artist’s caress, as “waiting for a pure time to come, time without a content.”

An already imploded sculpture at Royale Projects:

And the process of implosion of a new piece at the gallery, during the opening:  (details)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photos: Peter Kirby

“Only art can go someway toward making accessible, towards waking into some measure of communicability, the sheer inhuman otherness of the matter – the retractions out of reach of rock and wood, of metal and fiber. … Without the arts, form would remain unmet and strangeness without speech in the silence of the stone.”  George Steiner

Bibliography

George Steiner, Real Presences, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1989;  Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, Gallimard, Paris 1942; Concettuale in Italia 1965-1972, Galleria Milano, 1987; Ewerdt Hilgemann, Art Affairs, Amsterdam, 2015; Emmanuel Levinas, Le temps et l’autre, PUF, Paris 1983.

Emmanuel Levinas, 1906-1995. French philosopher born in Lithuania to Jewish parents. At home they spoke Yiddish as well as Russian. In 1928-29 he studied under Edmond Husserl and Martin Heidegger. He was the first to introduce their ideas into France. Levinas was a prisoner of war in a German camp, while his wife and daughter hid in a French convent. One of his early books, Le temps et l’autre, taught me nuances and defaults of our understanding, and the lack of reality of idealistic abstractions: time, being, existence merge into the fullness of life, and only the face-to-face with other humans allows them to exist. Levinas took his notes for this book when he was a prisoner. RA

GIULIANA CUNEAZ : Remaking the Natural Magic

I speak within the time and out of time.
I speak for yesterday and today;
for yesterday which is a lesson of life,
for today which is a lesson of death.

Edmond Jabès

GIULIANA CUNEAZ, Le cabinet de la neige, 2014  Video installation  3D animation, wood, clay and acrylic paint with crystal dust, monitor.  76 x 65 x 50 cm.   Courtesy of the artist and Gagliardi e Domke Gallery, Torino

A myriad of interior sceneries from mother earth,
always struck with amazement

by Rosanna Albertini

Common sense says that we only see what we know. Giuliana Cuneaz invites us to the opposite journey and brings us, at least in our imagination, to a living universe out of the reach of our perception, a realm of infinite transformations and a variety of forms. She is attracted by the invisible presence of the same kind of patterns shaping the forms of neurons, roots, or mineral structures. She wonders about the natural ‘thinking’ that seems to have been designed for the shell, bark or minerals’ inner architecture. ‘Designed?’ By whom? When? Hard to find the proper words for the secret growth of a living world that doesn’t need humans to exist.

Her art is one more physical process, something in between visible things as they appear in the daylight and invisible configurations revealed by electron microscopes and digital simulations.

As an artist, she can only be absurd:

The absurd work illustrates how thinking gives up with prestige and accepts to be nothing more than intelligence activating appearances and covering with images what doesn’t have a reason to exist. If the world were easy to see, art wouldn’t be.  Albert Camus

GIULIANA CUNEAZ, Le cabinet de la neige, (details), 2014   Uncooked clay, acrylic paint with crystal dust.  
 

Through valleys and woods, Giuliana put her green eyes at work to discover the fairies’ sites – each of them has a name in her mountains. At the mouth of cracks, or caves, she placed a music stand holding a piece of music written for one instrument. She gave to the silent fairies a musical voice that the public could listen to in a building, where humans and invisible presences were wrapped in the same vibrations. Fairies are not always good, they can be scary or threatening.

One of these invisible fairies, hidden in the image of her place, followed me through a photograph — given to me by Giuliana — in all the moves I went through since my visit to the mountains: the site looks quite dark, with rocks and pine trees ravaged by the wind. The Fairy of Grand Brissogne is now here in front of me, between the keyboard and the computer screen. In my attachment to that picture I probably did see my own life as the life of an absurd woman accepting sadness and fear as a present. Obstacles needing to be defeated.

GIULIANA CUNEAZ, Matter Waves Unseen, 2013  Video installation. 3D animation, wood, monitor, plexiglass, led, sand, clay, acrylic paint. 165 x 113,5 x 40 cm.  Courtesy of the artist and Private collection.

Giuliana Cuneaz engaged her life in a similar struggle, at the same time asking her hands to remake the natural magic, covering with handmade figures of curiosities and rarities the shelves of contemporary Wunderkammers, the chambers of marvels. Only one of her many artworks. It’s so wonderful to see a snow that doesn’t melt on the wood and shines forever, crystal by crystal, and to realize how the artist’s hands transformed uncooked clay into stars, corals, and seeds and flowers: natural forms whose story is only “invincible progress of the form, a sort of visible music”. (Paul Valéry)
For once, the fairies have been benevolent.

To break the crust of solid material bodies, trying to turn inside out the natural birth of crystals, rocks, or shells, this is the challenge that Giuliana Cuneaz seems to have embraced for a long time, offering to us her imaginary visit into the heart of matter. Her handmade objects are humble replicas. That’s for their marvelous configuration. Where they came from, at first, is a process lost in the dark of undetected beginnings, as if an artist had made them.

GIULIANA CUNEAZ, Matter Waves Unseen, 213, details

Happiness and absurdity are two children of the same ground. …
When sadness raises up in a human heart, the rock is winning, sadness is the rock itself. …
The absurd woman contemplating her suffering shuts all the idols down. In the universe suddenly brought back to silence, appear thousands of small, stupefied voices of the earth. …
Sisyphus teaches the superior loyalty that denies gods and lifts rocks. She also believes that everything is good. This universe deprived of gods doesn’t seem sterile to her, nor trivial. Every grain of the stone, every mineral sparkle of this mountain filled with weight is a world by itself. Struggling toward the top can fill up a woman’s heart. Imagine lady Sisyphus is a happy one. … The absurd woman says yes and her effort will never cease.
Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, 1942 (with my alteration into a feminine mode).

GIULIANA CUNEAZ, Matter Waves Unseen, 2013, details

3D computer graphics helped her to add a mental magic to the physical appearance of objects. Sculpting forms is not enough. They die in their frozen stillness. Giuliana Cuneaz’s chambers of marvels include a screen showing the 3D computer graphic version of the same objects she had made. The fantastic sceneries she displays have two different lives: one is a lesson of death cherished, honored by the artist’s fingers accepting the drama of making a physical form, the other on the screen is a lesson of life in search of visible modulations, bursts of changes, phases of passage, movements.

 

Giuliana Cuneaz, Matter Waves Unseen, 2013  3D computer animation  Courtesy of the artist and Private collection

Giuliana’s waves are earthly as if the clay, the shy and silent skin of the earth, had suddenly made her surface strong and dynamic like the ocean waves — each bringing new presents to the seashore. Although supported by numbers and programs, artificial life doesn’t cease to be human. It’s our brain trying to approach, to understand the admirable quality of natural artifacts. Inner landscapes suggested by microscopic photographs and nanotechnologies gave to my artist, maybe, the same surprise as the anatomic drawings gave to the 15th century’s artists. We see her imagination at work, and we can be transported with her inside her earthly waves, like we were invisible particles of dust.

Un saggio: L’anima verso cui andiamo è un paese di neve. …
Un saggio: … Un paese tagliato nell’acqua indurita dal gelo. L’acqua ci custodisce. Cosi i ghiacciai, gli occhi dilatati degli scomparsi.

Edmond Jabès

A wise man: The soul we go after is a country of snow. …
A wise man: … A country cut into the water hardened by cold. Water preserves us. So the glaciers, and the dilated eyes of the dead.

Yes, crystals are black in the valley of snow. They can’t forget they need to pause on the rocky surface of mountains, or the smoother layers of clay. Black is memory of their love joining them to the pebbles, of melting on the skin of an obstinate, stringent partner. Water and dirt are inseparable like day and night. Chemistry tells us that life springs from that wedding. We should unite our body to them, and remember in our cells what we are not able to know.

 

Giuliana Cuneaz, Chrystal Growth 2012, 3D animation Courtesy of the artist and Gagliardi e Domke Gallery, Torino

Giuliana Cuneaz at work

Bibliography

Edmond Jabès, Le livre des questions, Paris, Gallimard, 1963. Il libro delle interrogazioni, trad. it. di Chiara Rebellato, Casale Monferrato, Marietti, 1985

Paul Valéry, L’homme et la coquille, Paris, Gallimard, 1937

Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, Paris, Gallimard, 1942

William Bryant Logan, DIRT, The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, New York, The Berkley Publishing Group, 1995

 

A MAGIC BROOM

ED CLARK – painter               by Rosanna Albertini    

 It’s not so much art as it is…life (John Cage)

His life. An American artist born in 1926. He went from Chicago to Paris in the Fifties when Picasso, Braque, Chagall, not to mention Sartre and Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, walked in and out through clouds of smoke: Paris as it happened to be in the fifties. Nevertheless, the artist to whom Clark felt closest to was Nicolas de Stael. Maybe Ed Clark recognized in his landscapes the desperate passion of someone who tried to keep his visions separate from war’s tragedies and the immediate after war poverty and lack of fortune, but who also gave up and jumped onto the void in 1955. Clark tried to paint in the style of his friend. Probably his way to put himself in another artist’s mind, an extreme act of sympathy: The City, 1953. It’s a dark painting. Maybe Ed Clark gave to the city blocks a New York light, or it was his friend’s sadness.

The very young African American painter fell in love with Paris. I can see him converting “the very pulses of the air into revelations” (Henry James), finding a broom and sweeping his feelings over the canvas -the canvas is on the floor. He added freedom and energy to the impulses coming to him from an old, wounded world.

EDWARD CLARK, The City, 1953, oil on canvas. Private collection. Courtesy of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

EDWARD CLARK, The City, 1953, oil on canvas. Private collection.
Courtesy of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

PARIS IN THE 50s FROM ALBERT CAMUS’ NOTEBOOKS (1951-59), with bugs interpolated.

Man of 1950: he fornicated and read the newspapers.

Did he, an American in Paris?

Never attack anybody, especially not in writing. The time of criticism and polemics is over – Creation.

From now on, the single and constant affirmation. Understand them all. Love and admire but few.

The public no longer accepts intelligence except within idiotic commentaries.

The more I look at Ed Clark’s most recent paintings, the less I want to put words on them. They exude physical strength and joy of discovery: meanings fly around them almost embracing the canvas, and yet they don’t dare to interrupt with shadows the paintings’ inner life. Directions, stories, sounds, pierce his mind before they fall on the canvas: and every time it’s a new conversation between colors and forms. Because the natural disorder becomes human, captured by an impulse of love, love for the living present, in front of the newness of a painted landscape borrowing natural colors and lights, but escaping time. Clark’s voice: “Wherever he is, an artist, you know, has to do what he believes it’s right.” As if the action of painting had told him what to do: don’t reproduce anything you have seen.

EDWARD CLARK, Untitled, 2013, acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist Courtesy of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

EDWARD CLARK, Untitled, 2013, acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist
Courtesy of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

 

EDWARD CLARK, Untitled (China Series), 1995, acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist Courtesy of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

EDWARD CLARK, Untitled (China Series), 1995, acrylic on canvas. Collection of the artist
Courtesy of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

“It’s not so much art as it is … life.” Life’s physical threads, movements, changes, adaptations, dimensions, the power of center as well as the softness of marginal strokes. The beauty of a sense of balance. Clark’s paintings are islands of visual music, linked to the heartbeats.

Abstractions? I’d like better not to say so. First word everybody mumbles in front of these paintings, as if the viewers had eyes in their mouth. I’m paraphrasing John Cage. His 1967 attack of impatience: “As they listen to music they start talking. Do they have ears in their mouth? Are they stupid?” True, there is no such thing as silence. Can they just listen? Can we just look, look and wait until the painting awakes in each of our cells, matter talking to matter, and then we’ll see?

“If anything is communicated by art, it happens without any explicit desire for communication. It is communicated by art, involuntarily and to the same extent, to both the artist and the spectator. If the spectator is amazed by a work, so is the artist, unaware as he is of his “achievement.” (Giulio Paolini)