The exhibition SALVE at the Luigi Varoli Civic Museum in Cotignola (RA), represents for Christian Holstad (1972, California) the first solo show in Emilia Romagna, in the Romagna hinterland that was now dear to him. The exhibition takes place in two different spaces and two presentations marked the set-up process. Despite the two distinct temporal moments – the first act A flutter of butterflies atop debris to reach our gentle heights inaugurated on March 9th and the second one last April 12th entitled HELLO – the exhibition path is strongly coherent, offering an overview of the artist’s past, current and plausibly future research. The curator himself Gioele Melandri specifies how the two acts marked a tribute and a dialogue with local traditions and history in the first case, and the recognition of the artist and his substantial 30-year work, in the second.
Melandri’s involvement of Holstad takes place within a broader program that the latter curates for the Luigi Varoli Civic Museum. The program includes an exhibition per year dedicated to the revival of Varoli’s favorite material, papier-mâché, from an economic and equal perspective, involving contemporary artists who may or may not have already introduced the material into their own artistic practice.
Holstad, in fact, in the early 2000s, presented a series of small balloons made of papier-mâché at the Daniel Reich Gallery in New York. Due to this affinity with the poor material and his assiduous presence in the territory, the artist responded positively to the call with the desire to present himself to the community: hence the title of the exhibition.
“Hello” is the respectful greeting with which one addresses the elderly and the artist, fascinated by the term, underlines the etymology of greeting in its original form of salvēre, to wish good health, as in English salve indicates a healing ointment. The friendly and welcoming greeting, understood at this point as the catalyst for the exhibition, materializes before the artist’s eyes on a Venetian floor that he crosses in the house of a local friend. The writing “hello” appears in several historic apartments in the form of flooring imitating mosaics and the artist translates it into a small mosaic installed on the wall made with eggshells, the first work designed for this exhibition.
Entrance (2023-2024) is the spokesperson for Holstad’s peculiar practice, that is, re-semanticizing matter. In fact, waste constitutes a necessary attitude for the artist to confer another value to waste and residues. The same constitutive elements of his works are real abandoned objects and given a new form and new meanings, in an aesthetic formula that absorbs conceptual reflections. Reuse against the rampant and capitalist waste in an egalitarian perspective among all matter – from the cuticle of the egg to the gold leaf – is the narrative pursued through his personal and visionary law of retaliation.
Subtly criticizing our consumer society, Holstad proposes kindness as an act of resistance. Gentle parade (2023-2024) shows this possible alternative to consumption (of goods, of landscapes..): butterflies in dried testaceal membrane emerge from a shopping cart found deformed and further wrinkled. The totem cart of a consumerist parade becomes sweetened, colourful, light and lifted by the arrival of the butterflies, emblem of delicacy and kindness. For Herman Hesse, butterflies are the essence of animals devoted only to love in a wonderful dress, the curator reminds us, and these, together with the balloons, are leitmotifs of the entire exhibition.
I Balloons in papier-mâché that rise out of the space and are gathered in a corner of the room are the originals, those from the early 2000s, and new ones, in both cases made with sheets of newspaper on which the artist pins the warning, “life is a gift”, and which in this case tower over the stoneware waste bins fired on the outside, a portrait of humanity.
The second act inaugurated the section dedicated to Holstad’s substantial production which has been ongoing since the end of the 90s. A series of works in newspaper as a support for the drawing – using gold leaf as a contrasting material to the poorer one of the paper – completes the exhibition at the Varoli Museum which expands into a second space, the Church of Pio Suffragio, located a few meters away. Here the artist presents a series of sculptures that take up the subject of the trolley in multiples with the appearance of jellyfish in a sea governed by the largest and most well-known corporate companies, surrounded by modular vases winking at the sphere of design.
A review by Roberta Smith for the New York Times defined Holstad as «a one-artist collective», notes Gioele Melandri and SALVEin fact, shows us in depth the multifaceted character of the artist who invites gentle resistance.
The exhibition will be open to visitors until June 30th.
