Piazza dei Martiri 58, 80121, Naples, Italy
Open: Mon-Sat 10am-7pm
Artist: Tursic & Mille
Alfonso Artiaco presents Tutto, più o meno, the fourth solo show by Tursic & Mille.
A pink bomb becomes a still life. The genre, natura morta, suits it strangely well. The violence of the present surfaces beneath the milky softness of the colour. Flowers disturb the appearance of a skull; a fragment of the universe finds its place within a painting. With Tutto, più o meno, Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille present thirteen new paintings at Alfonso Artiaco, in which any subject can change its nature through contact with paint. Everything, more or less: a promise of the absolute, immediately tempered by a qualification. Between the two, an interval opens in which painting acts.
For over twenty-five years, Tursic & Mille have been redefining the limits of the medium through an empirical practice in which process, concept and images shape a way of thinking through painting that is distinctly their own. Their work developed alongside the rise of the Internet, at a time when the very necessity of painting was being questioned. Painting appears to them precisely as a powerful tool for re- presenting the world through the images it produces, questioning them anew and slowing their flow. Matter, gesture, support and the history of painting form a semantic millefeuille that exceeds the subject depicted. All images become available, without predetermined hierarchies. Each painting can change the rules of the game and push excess to the point of a kind of minimalism.
The experiments of Lavis en Rose continue: the promise of happiness in “la vie en rose” is reduced to a simple technical procedure, lavis en rose – a wash of diluted pink. Pink lends catastrophe an unsettling allure. Over the pornographic scene, which promises to show everything, a thick, transparent layer of pink paint compels us to look through the painting, at the risk of discovering that there is nothing to see. Matter becomes the matrix of the desire to see.
Faced with the immediacy of contemporary images, this painting offers an experience that is not exhausted by the recognition of the subject and refuses mimesis. It attracts, holds, then disorients. What we see depends as much on the source image as on what happens to it as it becomes painting, becomes an object. It is within this transformation, this interval, that its critical force operates: the uses, hierarchies and habits of reading are brought back into play through the process of painting itself.
“What to do” leads to “how to do it”, ultimately reopening the vertiginous question of “why do it”.
With the nine shaped panels, the experience extends to the very contours of the painting. The rectangle extends along both its axes; images gather at the centre or spread across the surface of the object through a process of contamination. Gold and palladium bring actual light into play with painted light. Edges, thickness and reflections participate in representation and in the painting’s assertion of its own objecthood. The cross is a rectangle that insists, that resists.
How much of the world can a painting absorb—its violence, its seductions and its excesses? Tutto, più o meno leaves the question open, painting after painting. Painting welcomes everything that might put it to the test and transforms everything it takes hold of.
Everything is there, or almost.
Ida Tursic (1974, Belgrade, Serbia) and Wilfried Mille (1974, Boulogne-sur-Mer, France) live and work in Mazamet, France. The work of Tursic & Mille has been presented in numerous institutional solo exhibitions, most recently at Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes (2026); FRAC Normandie, Caen (2023); Consortium Museum, Dijon (2022); Le Portique, Le Havre (2021); Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (2020); Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris (2017); Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dole (2011); FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand (2011); and Musée régional d’art contemporain, Sérignan (2008–2009). The duo received the Fondation Simone et Cino Del Duca Prize in 2020 and the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard Prize in 2009. They were nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2019. Works by Tursic & Mille are held in the permanent collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; Le Consortium, Dijon; Berardo Collection, Lisbon; Fondation Francès, Senlis; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand; FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon; and the Fonds national d’art contemporain (FNAC), Paris, among others.
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