PER SPECULUM IN AENIGMATE

Aurel & Draga
Opening 25th February at 6PM
26th February – 13th March from 11AM to 8PM

PALAZZO BRANCACCIO
Rome

Per Speculum in Aenigmate is a special project which, for the first time at Palazzo Brancaccio, Rome, will forge a dialogue between Aurel K. Basedow’s new body of pictorial works and some of the iconic design pieces of the duo Draga & Aurel, to which he belongs.

The title of the exhibition refers to a fundamental passage from the First Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians. This biblical text, on which was founded the dogmatic Christian belief regarding the impossibility of any human knowledge in relation to the divine power, has been transformed by the artists Draga Obradovic and Aurel K. Basedow into its most evocative and poetic aspect. The mirror and enigma elements refer to the fact that their work is in a perennially split state— a scission in which its simultaneous nature as furnishing object and artwork is revealed.

The ordinary use of each of their products is amplified in the infinite reflections cast by the resin surfaces, which, appearing as thick glassy petrifications with sidereal nuances, rest on slender iron or bronze structures or even incorporate cement concretions themselves. Theirs is a consolidated formal and productive gestation, the aesthetic boundaries of which, however, Aurel recently decided to broaden, pushing beyond the paradigm of functionality, creating a series of paintings resembling solid translucent totems, sometimes containing fabric patterns and other times photographic images.

For Contemporary Cluster, Draga and Aurel have thus conceived of a hybrid itinerary that thoroughly exhibits the results of their artistic production. With the same rhythm as a musical score – consisting of notes but also slurs, accents, and rests – they modulate intentionally “cathedral-like” environments, made up of the marked alternating rhythm of different elements: tubular lights, monochrome altarpieces or chairs, placed to emphasize spatial symmetry or disclose eclectic multicolored clusters, in which the large “canvases” create a counterpoint with a series of punctiform tables.

The last room only houses Aurel’s artworks. A moment of intimacy, a “rest”, in which he focuses on inner themes, closely related to the current pandemic status; the concepts of fear or constraint are transferred and imprinted onto a set of papers where watery, continuous, and very decisive magmatic brush strokes unhesitatingly camouflage the peculiar aspects of photographic images, all selected from the artist’s personal archive.