Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Abitare A Roma FEBRUARY 21, 2009 - by Alessandra De Salvo

PRESENTISM: TIME AND SPACE IN THE LONG NOW

The Memmo Foundation will be hosting an installation by the great British artist, Brian Eno, until March 15.

Presentism is a work of video art, a sound installation, an immersive ambience in which to lose and abandon oneself. The work is the fruit of a thousand contaminations but, above all, it is the result of reflections on Futurism by one of the greatest and most polyhedric of contemporary artists, Brian Eno.

Musician, painter, sculptor, composer and record producer, Brian Eno is essentially an avant garde musician and a refined expert on video art. "I studied painting at a school of fine arts and, like many others, I started to play in a rock band," - declared the artist during a media conference. "When I started doing music I was very interested in approaching it in the same way as painting - I was searching for tranquillity and the infinite. Then I started to work with video and ended up doing two things that combined with each other - stationary music and painting in movement."

The result of this mixture of ingredients are ambient sounds and visions, works of video art, accompanied by hypnotic music. The colours, the lights, the images, the forms that flow across the screen vary with a slowness such that it can be very difficult to register on the brain of those who quickly pass by the work. To fully appreciate Presentism it is necessary to stop, stretch out in one of the seven red couches and relax the mind, concentrating solely on the fourteen images of varying forms and dimensions and on the two mounds of earth illuminated by the iridescent lighting that constitute the work.

"Presentism is the period of time from the now until that which is to come" - it deals with a very long interval of time. "I like my audience to have a comfortable experience, I want to create a space where you can stay for hours... In that way people's sense of time can change. Today, attention-spans are short - TV provides rapid details because people need stimulation. My work goes against all that and demonstrates that you can try to calm people, entice them into relaxing. The surrender of the senses is the second most important element of my work."

Presentism: Time And Space In The Long Now, February 20 - March 15, 2009 at Fondazione Memmo; Palazzo Ruspoli, Via del Corso 418, Rome, Italy

Italian-to-English translation by radiocitizen