In-Finitum
"In-Finitum" by François Xavier Saint-Pierre, Spring 2010, pp. 99-100
Within the labyrinthine streets of Venice is a Gothic building that recently hosted the ambitious and unusual exhibition “In-finitum.” Held at the Palazzo Fortuny, the exhibition included approximately 300 objects, ranging from items of archaeological interest to incomplete Old Master paintings to contemporary art. Organized by the collector and designer Axel Vervoordt and the curator Daniela Ferretti, with works drawn from the Vervoordt Foundation, various Venetian museums and the Fortuny Museum’s own collection as well as private collections, the show investigated notions of the cosmic, the indefinite, the infinite and the unfinished.
The space, the former home and studio of the eccentric and prolific creator Mariano Fortuny, does not follow the typical blueprint of the modern museum. Instead, the long, densely hung rectangular spaces of the multi-storey palazzo are reminiscent of the private exhibition spaces of earlier eras. “In-finitum,” fittingly, served as a Wunderkammer, lumping together contemporary art, high-modernist abstraction and historical detritus. A single antique cupboard, for example, contained a 1963 Robert Ryman painting that was partly obstructed by a diminutive brick-like sculpture by François Michel (dated 2006) as well as a small Picasso figurine and an uncompleted Egyptian basalt statue.
A darkened room provided the appropriate solemnity for an equally dark painting by Ad Reinhardt. Elsewhere, the raw canvas central to a Manzoni Achrome suggested the void that prefigures creation itself. Complementary notions of the unfinished abounded. Michaël Borremans’s seemingly unresolved 2008 painting The Ghost was paired with a late-18th-century painting in a gilt frame that appeared to have been abandoned. On easels a few feet away were a large, gestural Miró underpainting and a 2008 Marlene Dumas work described as “unfinished” in the catalogue.
The seemingly informal accumulation and juxtaposition of objects resulted in some unusual effects. A tiny Morandi still life relegated to a darkened wall over a couch was obscured by the kidney-shaped shadows cast by a Calder mobile. In contrast, a James Turrell light installation, pristinely displayed in its own room, appeared almost museological. It begged the question: why so precious about one and not the other?
The son of a celebrated painter, the Spanish-born Mariano Fortuny (b. 1871) left no discipline untouched: painting, photography, textiles, theatre and fashion design were all fair game for this 20th-century artistic alchemist. Fortuny’s fin-de-siècle aesthetic was in evidence throughout the installation: his decadent fabrics were draped from floor to ceiling, masking walls and absorbing the dim illumination emitted by his signature lamps.
Keeping watch over this curated tenebrism was a Fortuny self-portrait. Its dark, bearded visage and severe gaze suggest a man who tested the limits of everything—as does this exhibition.
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