Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), 2018

Basel 2018
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Galleria Franco Noero

Installation
Colored confetti; 10 elements
90.0 x 90.0 x 90.0 (cm)
35.4 x 35.4 x 35.4 (inch)
Lara Favaretto’s cubes of confetti have an unstable appearance, embodying an ephemeral sense of transience, marked by the flow of time. And yet, in them, we find both antagonism and contradiction. The mass of paper confetti is compressed inside a wooden casing only by the weight and action of the human body. Its solidity is constantly undermined by an inevitable and yet unpredictable disintegration. The initial purity and compactness of the shape and color of these cubes is made vulnerable by the extreme lightness and volatile nature of the material they are made of. All it takes is a puff of air to disperse the tiny colored fragments, and the cubes gradually surrender to probable collapse – and early ruin. They recover their initial shape only when they are compressed again, starting out from scratch. The polyphonic nature of the work emphasizes the characteristics of the individual cubes, and the choice of colors is inspired by a frame from the comic film Birdman (2014), about an aging superhero actor who wants to be taken seriously. The aim is to convey the cathartic and transformative power that can be suggested by a range of separate, deconstructed tones, without the need for any additional form of narrative.