TRANSCENDENTAL REALISM
The Art of Adi Da Samraj
PRESS CONFERENCE: SATURDAY 9th JUNE 2007 FROM 10.45 TO 11.15 AM, TEATRO PICCOLO – ARSENALE, Calle della Tana 2168/B
INAUGURATION (COCKTAIL WITH PERFORMANCE):
PRESS PREVIEW: 6-7-8-9 June 2007 Opening hours: 10.00 am – 8.00 pm
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC: 10th June - 21st November 2007 Opening hours: 10.00 am – 6.00 pm (closed on Mondays, except Monday 11th June)
VENUE: Palazzo Bollani, Castello 3647- 30122 Venice
ORGANIZATION:
CO-ORDINATION:
WITH THE SUPPORT OF: Ecstatic Art and Theatre Project / www.ecstaticproject.org PATRONISED BY: Regione Veneto, Provincia di Venezia, Comune di Venezia
CO-COMMISSIONERS:
HONORARY COMMISSIONERS:
CHIEF CURATOR: Achille Bonito Oliva
CO-CURATOR: Peter Frank
ARTIST: Adi Da Samraj
"Transcendental Realism. The Art of Adi Da Samraj", curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, presents works by the spiritual master who is an accomplished artist and scholar. For much of the last decade the New York-born, Fiji-based teacher has explored new forms of digital technology to produce complex and sophisticated images embodying his religious and philosophical teachings. His “Transcendental Realism", is an immersive display of monumental, boldly colored, and powerfully structured images. CURATORIAL CONCEPT Adi Da Samraj has established a new use of geometry, as a fertile field of unconventional aesthetic communication that takes delight in developing its principles asymmetrically, through surprise and feeling. However, there is no contradiction between these two elements and the principles of design. Rather, surprise and feeling strengthen those principles, through a pragmatic and un-preconceived use of "representational"
The classical quality of Adi Da Samraj lies in his readiness to accept the intelligent chance inherent in life, the potential of the universe. Art becomes the place where the artist formalizes these principles and integrates them into his work, which is pervaded by a geometry that plays with asymmetry to produce a dynamic, rather than static, effect. The artist always creates families of works, stemming from matrices that can be multiplied to produce complementary but differing shapes. Thus, the concept of design takes on a new meaning, in that the act of designing a work of art no longer stands as a singular moment of arrogant precision. Rather, design is open to multiple realizations, albeit guided by a method defined through practice and creative impulse. Here, we have digital images—figures, cubes, pyramids, and other computer-generated geometric forms—which comprise the figurative element of our time, when technology tends to dematerialize and abstract all form. Art, on the other hand, tends to make form manifest, to materialize geometry. Adi Da Samraj’s two- and three-dimensional shapes are always concrete communicative realities, statements of a mental order that is never repressive or closed off, but always germinating and unpredictable. In all instances, shapes germinate and multiply with sudden offshoots that reveal the potential of a new geometric eroticism. His shapes always have a human-scale monumentality far from the aggressive rhetoric of sculpture. Thus, the artist is not setting out to wage a conventional "war" against real forms. Rather, he wishes to create a communicative framework for analysis and synthesis—analysis resulting from the possibility of verifying the germination of families of shapes, and synthesis resulting from the delicate power emanating from the works displayed before our eyes. Achille Bonito Oliva My images are about how Reality Is—and they are also about how Reality appears, in the context of natural perception, as a construction made of primary shaping-forces. My image-art is, therefore, not merely "subjectively”
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