Lo spazio in questione è l’ingresso di Palazzo Pancrazi, sede comunale, che sta per cambiare ruolo nella vita della cittadina. Per secoli è stato infatti il luogo deputato all’affissione di atti pubblici e comunicazioni del Sindaco e della giunta, fungendo come spazio comune dove amministrazione e cittadini potevano incontrarsi; adesso che tutto viene pubblicato sul web, tramite un albo pretorio virtuale, quest’area può essere dedicata ad un nuovo tipo di comunicazione.

Una comunicazione creativa e artistica, che regalerà anche magnifici contrasti tra la sobrietà e l’imponenza delle volte e degli affreschi e le opere d’arte contemporanea che si avvicenderanno in questo nuovo spazio espositivo, dotato anche di un bel  vantaggio: un grande portone sempre aperto che è un ottimo invito ad entrare senza creare soggezione.
A sperimentare il nuovo ruolo di Palazzo Pancrazi è stato Keane, che forse per primo ha intuito la potenzialità di questo spazio, usato fino ad oggi come luogo di servizio e che, grazie alla sua mostra The Death of Analogue Television, ha aperto una nuova epoca di mostre e installazioni nel Castello.

[View with PicLens]

Artisti di diverse estrazioni si succederanno durante l’anno secondo un calendario che prevede anche la collaborazione e la professionalità dello stesso Keane, di Lucia Morelli e Nicola Salotti di Venti d’Arte, del gruppo Inspired by Barga e da Giorgia Madiai, che sapranno portare a Barga professionisti  di livello nel campo dell’arte.
Soddisfatto di questa iniziativa anche il sindaco Marco Bonini, che questa mattina, assieme all’assessore alla cultura Giovanna Stefani ha presentato la nuova destinazione dell’atrio e tagliato il nastro della prima installazione.

[View with PicLens]

Una mostra più che mai attuale, dato che consacra la vecchia televisione, quella che – dal momento dello switch off, avvenuto a novembre scorso – non esiste più.
Keane ha smontato almeno venti apparecchi e da ognuno ha estratto le componenti essenziali, quei pezzi che non abbiamo mai visto ma che per anni sono stati per noi compagni fedeli: circuiti, transistor, resistenze, che ha poi ingrandito sulla tela dando loro una nuova identità, rendendoli quasi animati, come fossero davvero personaggi della nostra esperienza televisiva e di vita.

Le tele pendono dal soffitto specularmente, creando un percorso di andata e ritorno tra le immagini di trasformatori giganti che sembrano templi, gruppi di transistor che sembrano animali in transumanza, circuiti stampati che sembrano città viste dal cielo.

L’esperienza di questo percorso è arricchita dalla musica di Gian Marco Marseglia, che ha composto le melodie lavorando in stretto contato con Keane, cucendo su misura suoni elettronici che variano poi verso il tema di una delle più famose trasmissioni di documentari. La musica, che non invade lo spazio della mostra ma semplicemente lo completa, è diffusa attraverso vecchie casse di televisori, anch’esse appese al soffitto. Sui lati dell’atrio due vecchi televisori accesi ma senza più niente da dire, ci ricordano il destino dei soggetti dipinti. – more images here

The article is here : – Three weeks ago during the night, a couple of painted nuns appeared on a wall on a disused building in Barga Vecchia.

Although nobody ever took responsibility for the paintings it was no secret that the artist Keane has been working since 2005 on a series of paintings based around the Nuns of Barga and so most people assumed it was a continuation of that work.

What people were not prepared for was when one of the painted figures then just disappeared during the night when no witnesses were around. Was it painted over ? First there were two, then one.

As it turned out they were not painted directly onto the walls but instead were painted on paper that was then glued to the wall with flour paste.

[View with PicLens]

Last night the second nun vanished like the first. The image being cleanly ripped off the wall whole … no clues as to just who was responsible … is there somebody out there collecting images of nuns or did somebody dislike the images so much that that felt they had to remove them?

They have gone but strangely enough they have left behind a a nun like outline on the wall where they once were .. a ghostly nun after- image.

It kind of fits with the work that Keane has been doing somehow ……. this is what he said in May of last year -

The work is based around a small group of people who have been living and working in Barga for generations, but now as a group are close to extinction – the nuns of Barga.

Their numbers can be counted on one hand, and they always seemed to move around in a group. Just what is the collective noun for a group of nuns .. a flock of nuns, a gaggle .. a pride maybe ? Very rarely is it possible to spot a single nun in the streets of the city.

The main group comprising of three very aged women, all diminutive in stature, and all three of formidable character.

Local residents, describe these three nuns, as always appearing aged. It would seem that nobody can remember them as young women. And there lies the problem, the young Italian women are no longer becoming nuns.

It is very difficult to find recent data on the precise number of nuns living and working in Italy but their numbers are decreasing rapidly and even the new novices coming in from Africa and Asia can no longer fill the gap.

Shortly, this compact group of dark clad women moving ghost like through the streets of Barga will be just that – ghostly memories

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pTqxbVEPys

[View with PicLens]

Work in progress 2008 – 2009 – more here

The Aristo three minute sketches are just quick scribbled sketches in to a small notebook which are then picked up by the receiver and transferred to the computer via USB.

While there are other ink-to-digital pens out there, the difference here is Wacom’s pressure technology. Recording 1024 levels of pressure, the Inkling will capture ever nuance in your drawings. This is how it works:

• Take the stylus and receiver out of the neat portable box.
• Clip the receiver on top of any paper notebook and start drawing. Don’t worry about space: the receiver can store thousands of pages, according to Wacom.
• When you are done after a day, connect the receiver to the computer via USB and browse all your drawings, exporting the ones you like to Photoshop or Illustrator or any typical graphic format, from TIFF to JPG.

That’s one of the beauties of this. From their Inkling Sketch Manager you can rasterize your drawings at print resolution and export them to Photoshop. Or even better: you can export as a vector illustration to Adobe Illustrator, which will allow you to re-work your lines in any way you want.

The Wacom Inkling comes with a pen, receiver, rechargeable batteries, four spare pen ink cartridges, charging case and the Inkling Sketch Manager Application, which is neatly store in the Inkling receiver.

[View with PicLens]

The Inkling product will be introduced in the USA with limited availability in mid-November. Initial supplies of the product will be used to fulfill a portion of the backlog of orders at Amazon.com, currently Wacom’s selected reseller of the product in the United States.  The Inkling site is here

The original Halloween was for adults and was a pretty scary event all things considered. It was taken across the Atlantic to the the States by waves of immigrants where over the years it was transformed into a more commercially minded, child orientated kind of party and from there it was re-exported back to Europe in its mutated form.

Still, watching a group of smiling Lake Angels carrying a coffin through the narrow streets of Barga Vecchia in bright Autumn sunshine did make one or two visitors to Barga stop in their tracks and pull out their cameras to record the event.

There were more cameras snapping in Piazza Angelio as well as a collection of umbrellas painted specially on the theme of Halloween by Keane were set out ready for a short video using some pretty sophisticated hardware – a Parrot Wi-Fi controlled flying quadricopter with two webcams on board which hovered above the umbrellas on the steps leading down to the piazza.

Now, all eyes are on the weather forecast for tomorrow (which for the moment looks pretty good) as nobody wants a repeat of last years Halloween which was rained out at the last moment.

[View with PicLens]

Historian Nicholas Rogers, exploring the origins of Halloween, notes that while “some folklorists have detected its origins in the Roman feast of Pomona, the goddess of fruits and seeds, or in the festival of the dead called Parentalia, it is more typically linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain, whose original spelling was Samuin (pronounced sow-an or sow-in)”. The name is derived from Old Irish and means roughly “summer’s end”.A similar festival was held by the ancient Britons and is known as Calan Gaeaf (pronounced Kálan Gái av).

The festival of Samhain celebrates the end of the “lighter half” of the year and beginning of the “darker half”, and is sometimes regarded as the “Celtic New Year”.

The ancient Celts believed that the border between this world and the Otherworld became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits (both harmless and harmful) to pass through. The family’s ancestors were honoured and invited home while harmful spirits were warded off. It is believed that the need to ward off harmful spirits led to the wearing of costumes and masks. Their purpose was to disguise oneself as a harmful spirit and thus avoid harm. In Scotland the spirits were impersonated by young men dressed in white with masked, veiled or blackened faces. Samhain was also a time to take stock of food supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. Bonfires played a large part in the festivities. All other fires were doused and each home lit their hearth from the bonfire. The bones of slaughtered livestock were cast into its flames.Sometimes two bonfires would be built side-by-side, and people and their livestock would walk between them as a cleansing ritual. – source

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuO0rq3I334

Halloween images from the barganews archives 1999 | 2001 | 2003 |2004 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 |

The answer, says an exhibition in the entrance hall of Palazzo Pancrazi, home of Barga’s municipal government, is not a fixed aesthetic vocabulary grounded in local history.  It is a rainbow of individual and sometimes impulsive choices by local property owners, abetted by romantic fantasies of what a Tuscan townscape ought to look like.

The exhibition itself, entitled “The Walls of Barga,” resembles an enlarged version of the colour samples that hardware stores offer to customers. Slashes of rose, burnt siena, yellow-gold and burgundy are painted across the 13 canvases displayed in the hall.

“They are literally the colours that were being ‘tested’ on the walls of Barga Vecchia in 2006 and 2007,” says the artist Keane, an editor of this publication.

“The architects and painters who did the work agreed to share the actual pigment samples with me. Each of the canvases at Palazzo Pancrazi represents one of the facades that was being resurfaced then.”

On one level, the “Walls of Barga” is deliberately meant to echo Keane’s earlier “Mutande di Barga,” a series of large-scale paintings devoted to the undergarments hung outside the town’s homes to dry. Like the mutande, the building colours are a principal but unacknowledged feature of community life, seen everyday although seldom remarked upon.

On another level, however, the new mostra is a meditation on the serendipitous nature of “classic appearance.”

In effect, the canvases picture dozens of varying guises that 13 of the town’s historic buildings might have adopted half a decade ago. “If all or most of the owners had made other choices from the samples, the Barga you see today would be remarkably different.”

[View with PicLens]

“Walls” invites the viewer to imagine that unrealized Barga – and in doing so, to speculate on the dynamic of choice. Its implicit themes range from political correctness to the vagaries of popular taste.

Since the 1980s, when Italy began rebelling against the mindless construction that ruined many historic town centres after World War II, exterior changes on venerable buildings have been treated as nearly criminal offences. A huge and nominally inflexible bureaucracy materialized, with its energies directed at saying “no” to any permit request that dared propose a window, a balcony – or even the installation of a solar panel.

Yet as any local oldtimer will tell you, Barga underwent a dramatic metamorphosis in those same years. Bureaucracy notwithstanding, she was transformed from a no-nonsense Val di Serchio casalinga, clothed exclusively in austere gray or cream-white, into a lively ragazza parading the colours that dominate Keane’s canvases.

The result, in cultural terms, is that mountainside Barga now closely resembles a Ligurian seaport, where cheery pastels are traditional. That, of course, is exactly how the town’s visitors – and increasingly its property owners – always imagined her.  A burst of colour under the warm Tuscan sun.

But as Keane notes, the mountains will always have the last word. The first canvas you see on entering the exhibition is a montage of chipped and faded paint strips, weather-worn into something more eloquent than bright pastels after one season of winter storms.

I più ardenti sostenitori di Barga amano definirla “una tipica cittadina sulla collina toscana”. Ma cosa dà a Barga quest’aria classica, così “toscana”?

La risposta viene da una mostra allestita nell’atrio di Palazzo Pancrazi, sede del Comune, e non è solo una mera questione di estetica radicata nella storia locale.

È piuttosto un arcobaleno di scelte individuali a volte anche impulsive fatte dai proprietari degli immobili, complici di alimentare la romantica fantasia di come il paesaggio toscano dovrebbe essere.

La mostra, dal titolo The Walls of Barga – I muri di Barga, assomiglia a un grande campionario di colori come quelli che le ferramenta e i colorifici mettono a disposizione dei clienti. Le tonalità del rosa, del terra di Siena, del giallo dorato e del bordeaux sono riprodotti sulle 13 tele in mostra.

“Sono esattamente i colori testati sui muri di Barga Vecchia nel 2006 e nel 2007” Spiega Keane, l’artista che ha realizzato le opere.

“Gli architetti e gli imbianchini hanno accettato di darmi parte dei colori utilizzati per le prove che facevano sui muri. Ognuna di queste tele rappresenta le facciate che stavano per essere rifatte”.

Da un lato “I muri di Barga” fa volutamente eco al precedente lavoro di Keane “Le mutande di Barga”, una serie di grandi dipinti dedicati alla biancheria stesa fuori dalle finestre ad asciugare. E come le “mutande”, il colore degli edifici è una caratteristica importante ma non riconosciuta della vita barghigiana, vista ogni giorno anche se raramente osservata.

Su un altro piano, invece, questa mostra è una riflessione sulla natura casuale dell’aspetto classico di Barga.

I quadri esposti a Palazzo Pancrazi, infatti, ritraggono le diverse forme che 13 dei più antichi palazzi della cittadina avrebbero potuto assumere cinque anni fa.

“Se tutti i proprietari o la maggior parte di loro avessero fatto scelte diverse confronto ai campioni provati, la Barga che si vede oggi sarebbe stata molto diversa”, continua Keane.

“I Muri di Barga” invita quindi il visitatore ad immaginare quella Barga non realizzata, e conseguentemente a riflettere sulla forza della scelta.

I temi impliciti della mostra spaziano dall’essere “politically correct” ai ghiribizzi del gusto della gente.

Dagli anni Ottanta, quando l’Italia ha avviato una sorta di ribellione contro le brutte costruzioni che hanno rovinato molti centri storici dopo la seconda Guerra Mondiale, si è cominciato a considerare i cambiamenti sulle facciate dei palazzi più antichi come azioni criminali.

È apparsa così una smisurata burocrazia, inflessibile, intenta a dire “no” ad ogni richiesta di permesso che osasse intervenire su una finestra, un balcone o sull’installazione di un pannello solare.

Ma alla fine, in questi ultimi anni, Barga è stata investita da una grande metamorfosi.

Nonostante la burocrazia è stata trasformata da una scialba casalinga vestita solo di grigio o giallo crema in una ragazza vitale che sfoggia i colori che oggi dominano i quadri di Keane.

Il risultato, per quanto riguarda l’aspetto culturale, è che Barga, cittadina arroccata sotto le montagne, adesso appare più un porticciolo ligure dove i colori solari sono tradizionali.

Questo, naturalmente, è come i visitatori che giungono a Barga e i sempre più numerosi proprietari di immobili nel centro storico l’hanno sempre immaginata. Un’esplosione di colori sotto il tiepido sole della Toscana; ma, come fa notare Keane, le montagne avranno sempre l’ultima parola.

La prima tela che vedrete entrando è un montaggio di strisce di un colore ruvido e sbiadito, consumate dal tempo atmosferico e trasformate  in qualcosa di molto più eloquente che dei colori pastello dopo una stagione di temporali.

As Frank Viviiano reported that year ” Until 10 pm, it posed a silent metaphorical question mark for passersby and a full terrace of Osteria diners. Then, with clockwork precision, the static was suddenly converted to frenzied sound and movement. Trumpet king/composer Andrea Guzzoletti and keyboard magician Simone Venturi, two of Italy’s outstanding jazz talents, began playing selections from Guzzoletti’s riveting “invisible Cities,” inspired by Italo Calvino’s famous prose poem - Artists Fabrizio Da Prato and Keane, dressed in construction overalls and safety helmets and assisted by a muscle team, lifted the cube and lowered it over the musicians. In effect, they and their instruments were incarcerated in the huge hollow box, the exterior of which Keane and Da Prato set to painting. – (full article here)

That event drew a large audience  including almost all of the journalists, photographers and filmmakers in the area and so soon after films and photographs of the event flooded most of the social networks in this area on the internet. Many people commented on the huge size of the Cube and wondered what the Artists at Work team would come up with for the following year.

Well,  the contribution to the cultural life of Barga during the summer of 2011,  ironically has so far gone mainly unnoticed as the team instead decided that “size is not everything” and in fact ” small is beautiful”

[View with PicLens]

They created an installation in Barga Vecchia  which only the very observant would notice – The thumbnail Nuns of Barga.

Large full screen images of this installation can be seen by clicking here

Keane has been working on the theme of the nuns of Barga for over the past 5 or 6 years in various mediums ranging from drawings, photographs, paintings and murals. The following is the text written about the work back in 2008:

The work is based around a small group of people who have been living and working in Barga for generations, but now as a group are close to extinction – the nuns of Barga. Their numbers can be counted on one hand, and they always seemed to move around in a group. Just what is the collective noun for a group of nuns .. a flock of nuns, a gaggle .. a pride maybe ? Very rarely is it possible to spot a single nun in the streets of the city. The main group comprising of three very aged women, all diminutive in stature, and all three of formidable character.
Local residents, describe these three nuns, as always appearing aged. It would seem that nobody can remember them as young women. And there lies the problem, the young Italian women are no longer becoming nuns. It is very difficult to find recent data on the precise number of nuns living and working in Italy but their numbers are decreasing rapidly and even the new novices coming in from Africa and Asia can no longer fill the gap. Shortly, this compact group of dark clad women moving ghost like through the streets of Barga will be just that – ghostly – article from 2008

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVSW1mBnI94

Margini – stone installations at 1600 metres 2007

The Nuns of Barga – drawings/oil paintings 2006

The mutande of Barga – oil paintings 2005

Generated collision images – digital 2004

Tulse Luper Suitcases- images for Peter Greenaway 2004

Images created by text 2004

Leaning Tower of Pisa – taking back that which is ours – photographs 2003

147 CAI markings – paintings 2003

Da Vinci Table – painted sculpture 2003

Water Decay – drawings and prints 2003

Hands of the Artists – installation/performance for two artists – Livorno 2003

Signs at Casa Cordati 2002

World Cup television supporters 2002

The Decaying Site Project 2001

Blowing up Bin Laden 2000

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-a-cream 2000

200 Yellow Bicycles of Joensuu Finland 2000

tragica fine di Superbi Vascelli – Livorno Italy 1999

Body Partsan artists at work installation destroyed by ignorance 1999

The Barga Faces Project 4000 faces of the people of a small city in Italy 1999

Oma Maa Mansikka Muu Maa Mustikka Finland 1998

Packets sound poem Japan and Italy 1998

The Death of Paper Finland 1997

CUSEEMESEX safe sex on the net 1995

T.V 20 television destroyed monoprints and oil paintings 1994

The Carmobile e-mail address 1993

Window on Gallicano 1992

The Umbrellas of Barga 1990

Paintings from China pastels from Nanjing 1988

Pantelleria oil paintings from the black pearl of the Mediterranean 1985

Hands on election day photographs from Fosciandora Italy 1985

Fosciandora 7 years work painting landscapes in a small village in Tuscany, Italy

1983-1984 Toured Europe with own street theatre “Lord Lucan’s Travelling Box”
Since 1985 Living and working in Italy as a painter
1991 Elected member of Fine Art Society, Florence Italy
1992 With Fabrizio Da Prato and Tiziana Fontana formed “Artists at Work”
1996 started barganews.com

1982 Dudley Art Gallery, Dudley England
1983 Bournville Painters, Bournville England
1984 Gallery, Aix en Provence France
1988 Sala ex Archivio, Castelnuovo Garfagnana Italy
1989 Pantelleria, Trapani Italy
1990 Fine Art University, Nanjing China
1991 Italian Trade Centre, London England
1992 Casa di Dante, Florence Italy
1993 Palazzo della Cultura, Latina Italy
1994 Cardoso Art, Cardoso Italy
1995 Hijack Artvertising, Dublin/London/Milano/New York USA
1996 Hijack Artvertising, Colman Fine Art, London England
1996 Terre d’Acqua Biennale, Vercelli Italy
1996 Terra d’Acqua, Treviso Italy
1996 G7 Group, Sternen, Fluelen Switzerland
1997 Altsadthalle, Zug Switzerland
1997 Salle des Voutes, Cassis France
1998 Varkaus Art Museum, Varkaus, Finland
1999 Joensuu, River Art Finland
1999 “Candy Factory” Yokohoma, Japan
2000 Sottopassaggio73, Livorno Italy
2003 Signs at Casa Cordati, Barga Italy
2006 The Mutande of Barga, Florence, Italy
2008 Margini – stone installations at 1600 metres, La Pania, Italy
2010 The Nuns of Barga, “Artefact”, Fornaci di Barga, Italy

  ]]> http://www.giornaledibarganews.com/2011/09/01/keane-list-of-works-since-1985/feed/ 0 http://www.giornaledibarganews.com/2010/07/31/last-day-of-the-art-sale-sold-out/ http://www.giornaledibarganews.com/2010/07/31/last-day-of-the-art-sale-sold-out/#comments Sat, 31 Jul 2010 10:19:12 +0000 keane http://www.giornaledibarganews.com/?p=24072 Today is the final chance to pick up an art bargain from Casa Cordati as the exhibition SOLD OUT goes into its final day.  Specially printed leaflets were distributed in Barga this weekend featuring some of the art on sale in the gallery. The leaflets resembled quite closely the advertising leaflets which local supermarkets deliver to homes in the area showing discounts for their products. In fact on the Fabrizio Da Prato leaflet is shows all paintings discounted by an astounding 80 %; the Keane paintings showing a less startling figure of 33.3% discount.

The two artists featured this month at Barga’s Casa Cordati couldn’t be more different, apart from a peculiar common element in their work: faces. Or more properly, facelessness. The point is inescapable in the men and women who populate Fabrizio Da Prato’s canvases. They are presented head-on, yet for the most part entirely bleached of visible identity. Keane’s nuns are faceless by implication, turned decisively away from us, while the subjects of his mutande have in effect been reduced to their vacant undergarments, bodiless as well as faceless.

“Faces,” Da Prato says, “define a subject too quickly,” and by extension, superficially. They offer a recognizable and readable “person” – a distraction from the often more troubling persona below the surface.

And it’s there, below the surface of what we think we see (or want to recognize) in our collective and individual worlds, that the twenty-year collaboration between Keane and  Da Prato is best understood. They are both miners of the persona, endlessly digging into the shadows.

[View with PicLens]

The first two rooms belong to Da Prato, and they offer a journey that is sometimes harrowing and always intellectually acute. The walls throng with highly expressionstic couples, positioned so that they stare across the gallery at each other; families, both literal and metaphoric; solitary figures wrenched in painful contortion or lost to meditative reflection. Give these canvases the time they deserve – another characteristic Da Prato and Keane share is superb technical mastery of paint and form – and facelessness grows eloquent.

What it speaks to, at least for this observer, is the complex web of relationships that frame human experience, the emotional currents swirling around lovers, parents and children, and strangers who pass in the night. The currents we seldom acknowledge aloud, which is precisely what gives them their power.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzj5umg4LEA

Keane is also drawn to the unacknowledged, to landmarks and habits that derive power from the very fact that we seldom voice their meaning. But where Da Prato concerns himself with what lies hidden in the human heart, Keane turns his painterly eye on the hidden codes of community. His subject is the psyche of the group, the intimate dramas we witness collectively every day, but collectively pretend to ignore.

The mutande series, featured in exhibitions in several Tuscany venues since 2005, has stirred controversy everywhere its windblown boxer shorts and brassieres are hung. This is the unspoken social code writ large and ironic: in Italy, few artifacts of material culture are more ubiquitous than the undergarments floated in public to dry. They’re the iconic banners of Italian towns and cities. Everyone is familiar with the neighbors’ knickers, while no one admits to noticing them.

The suore of Barga are similarly iconic, but with a resonance that extends far into the community’s history as well as its behavioral codes. We’re promised a much larger mostra on the subject eventually, and the tantalizing selection in room four of the current exhibition is a taste of what to expect. Heads turned away, walking silently into the distance, these nuns are what Barga has been for nearly 2,000 years, and by inference, what Italy has been. Catholic, in its education, faith and ritual habits, and strongly attached to the traditional past. One of the striking things about Barga life is that the dwindling number of suore, as well as priests and parishioners, is almost never commented upon. Like the torments of the human heart in Fabrizio Da Prato’s paintings, the implications are tacitly suppressed.

[View with PicLens]

Yet what we know, what we cannot ignore, is that the past and its traditions are receding with each passing day, much later here than in other Western European nations, but just as irrevocably. Keane’s nuns embody tradition in all of its contradictory shadings: a past of intense and ancient faith that was at once a model of commitment and a symbol of rigid self-denial. They invite us to recall where we have been, as a community and a people – but also to wonder where we are headed.

“Sold Out,” the mostra’s title, has a wealth of overlapping connotations. In audience terms, it’s what this provocative exhibition certainly merits, a full house. But it is also a reference to the elemental human condition – the betrayal of the profound by the superficial, of the persona by public inhibitions, of tradition by the crushing force of change.

Article by Frank Viviano

By Heart

Plying the aisles
And billowing over benches,
Taming unruly urchins
Through white swathe
Of veil and habit,
The Scotch nun
Governed Class One
Sealed in linen
At the chin and temples.

A delph doll with limbs in-sewn
The stuff of her body
A staid mystery.
But for accidental show
Of hair at her neck’s nape
Or sight of veins
In her reddened neck
When her chin-cloth fell
In fury at girls
Who would not learn.

But proof of her human heart
Was known for sure
When poetry from her belly’s pit
Broke through glottal stops,
She rocked the forms and window panes
Sweeping her charges
From loch to mountainside,
She made the groan of Pìbroch
To sound about their ears
And left at last
All mourning
The watery death of
Lord Ullin’s daughter.

By Geraldine Bradley

The two artists featured this month at Barga’s Casa Cordati couldn’t be more different, apart from a peculiar common element in their work: faces. Or more properly, facelessness. The point is inescapable in the men and women who populate Fabrizio Da Prato’s canvases. They are presented head-on, yet for the most part entirely bleached of visible identity. Keane’s nuns are faceless by implication, turned decisively away from us, while the subjects of his mutande have in effect been reduced to their vacant undergarments, bodiless as well as faceless.

“Faces,” Da Prato says, “define a subject too quickly,” and by extension, superficially. They offer a recognizable and readable “person” – a distraction from the often more troubling persona below the surface.

And it’s there, below the surface of what we think we see (or want to recognize) in our collective and individual worlds, that the twenty-year collaboration between Keane and  Da Prato is best understood. They are both miners of the persona, endlessly digging into the shadows.

[View with PicLens]

The first two rooms belong to Da Prato, and they offer a journey that is sometimes harrowing and always intellectually acute. The walls throng with highly expressionstic couples, positioned so that they stare across the gallery at each other; families, both literal and metaphoric; solitary figures wrenched in painful contortion or lost to meditative reflection. Give these canvases the time they deserve – another characteristic Da Prato and Keane share is superb technical mastery of paint and form – and facelessness grows eloquent.

What it speaks to, at least for this observer, is the complex web of relationships that frame human experience, the emotional currents swirling around lovers, parents and children, and strangers who pass in the night. The currents we seldom acknowledge aloud, which is precisely what gives them their power.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzj5umg4LEA

Keane is also drawn to the unacknowledged, to landmarks and habits that derive power from the very fact that we seldom voice their meaning. But where Da Prato concerns himself with what lies hidden in the human heart, Keane turns his painterly eye on the hidden codes of community. His subject is the psyche of the group, the intimate dramas we witness collectively every day, but collectively pretend to ignore.

The mutande series, featured in exhibitions in several Tuscany venues since 2005, has stirred controversy everywhere its windblown boxer shorts and brassieres are hung. This is the unspoken social code writ large and ironic: in Italy, few artifacts of material culture are more ubiquitous than the undergarments floated in public to dry. They’re the iconic banners of Italian towns and cities. Everyone is familiar with the neighbors’ knickers, while no one admits to noticing them.

The suore of Barga are similarly iconic, but with a resonance that extends far into the community’s history as well as its behavioral codes. We’re promised a much larger mostra on the subject eventually, and the tantalizing selection in room four of the current exhibition is a taste of what to expect. Heads turned away, walking silently into the distance, these nuns are what Barga has been for nearly 2,000 years, and by inference, what Italy has been. Catholic, in its education, faith and ritual habits, and strongly attached to the traditional past. One of the striking things about Barga life is that the dwindling number of suore, as well as priests and parishioners, is almost never commented upon. Like the torments of the human heart in Fabrizio Da Prato’s paintings, the implications are tacitly suppressed.

[View with PicLens]

Yet what we know, what we cannot ignore, is that the past and its traditions are receding with each passing day, much later here than in other Western European nations, but just as irrevocably. Keane’s nuns embody tradition in all of its contradictory shadings: a past of intense and ancient faith that was at once a model of commitment and a symbol of rigid self-denial. They invite us to recall where we have been, as a community and a people – but also to wonder where we are headed.

“Sold Out,” the mostra’s title, has a wealth of overlapping connotations. In audience terms, it’s what this provocative exhibition certainly merits, a full house. But it is also a reference to the elemental human condition – the betrayal of the profound by the superficial, of the persona by public inhibitions, of tradition by the crushing force of change.

Article by Frank Viviano

By Heart

Plying the aisles
And billowing over benches,
Taming unruly urchins
Through white swathe
Of veil and habit,
The Scotch nun
Governed Class One
Sealed in linen
At the chin and temples.

A delph doll with limbs in-sewn
The stuff of her body
A staid mystery.
But for accidental show
Of hair at her neck’s nape
Or sight of veins
In her reddened neck
When her chin-cloth fell
In fury at girls
Who would not learn.

But proof of her human heart
Was known for sure
When poetry from her belly’s pit
Broke through glottal stops,
She rocked the forms and window panes
Sweeping her charges
From loch to mountainside,
She made the groan of Pìbroch
To sound about their ears
And left at last
All mourning
The watery death of
Lord Ullin’s daughter.

By Geraldine Bradley

[View with PicLens]

Si è chiusa con una sessione di pittura in estemporanea la collettiva Artefact presso l’iNStallazione di Venti d’Arte in via provinciale a Fornaci. Domenica 24 gennaio, infatti, gli artisti Keane, Sergio Fini e Nicola Salotti, prima di smontare le rispettive tele dalle pareti, hanno regalato ai presenti un quadro in divenire, realizzato a “sei mani”.
Da una grande tela bianca sulla quale faceva capolino una delle suore ritratte da Keane i tre hanno lavorato per più di un’ora con una continua evoluzione di forme e campiture, pennellando, sgocciolando, graffiando, sfumando colori ad olio, acrilici e smalti, in una babele di tecniche e modi di interpretare la pittura.
Ne è risultato un quadro che in realtà è molti quadri, ormai nascosti sotto le variazioni successive (una sorta di Dorian Gray Effect?) fatto sta che una metamorfosi tale è possibile da apprezzare solo essendo presenti, dato che, in pochi minuti tutto cambia e lascia spazio all’immagine successiva, e a quella dopo ancora, e ancora. Parodia della vita? O solo divertimento per gli artisti e i curiosi? Valutate voi -

article by Maria-Elena Caproni – Giornale di Barga

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In un ambiente che vuole lavorare con l’emozionalità, alla riscoperta di vecchi e nuovi codici, che crede necessario praticare la curiosità come approccio alle situazioni interne ed esterne, si vuole dare una possibilità di avvicinamento all’arte come riflessione personale e collettiva.

In concomitanza all’apertura del Laboratorio artistico, proverbialmente chiamato “l’iNStallazione di Venti d’Arte”, con l’intenzione di far meglio comprendere le motivazioni e le amorevoli velleità artistiche degli ideatori di questo luogo di contaminazione, si terrà l’inaugurazione della collettiva di pittura ARTEFACT.

KEANE – SERGIO FINI – NICOLA SALOTTI.

[View with PicLens]

Tre artisti poliedrici, caratterizzati dalla diversità di linguaggio, dalla ricerca dell’io interiore, dalla volontà di espressione concettuale.

Il termine ARTEFATTO, binomio scindibile in due parole ben distinte, richiama ad un effetto dell’arte, dove con ARTE si intende l’attitudine e la specifica attività interiore dell’uomo unita all’abilità tecnica esecutiva; e con FATTO l’effetto della messa in opera dell’arte.In un gioco di significati che interagiscono tra loro e che propongono una doppia sensibilità, gli artisti con le loro volontà singolari intraprendono un viaggio tra colori e forme in cui intendono proporre i valori intrinseci dell’anima esplicati come elementi del tutto soggettivi, ma legati ad una comunione di intenti che puntano a produrre manufatti d’arte, o artefatti. Tenendo come filo conduttore, quel sentire dell’arte e accompagnati e sempre guidati da un percorso interiore, i pittori lo comunicano magistralmente attraverso i propri singolari codici espressivi. La rappresentazione del mondo, resa manifesta dall’uso di simboli, si affaccia al contemplatore in cerca di feconda comunicazione. Gli artefatti non possono essere pensati indipendentemente dalle interazioni umane ed il valore estetico intrinseco è un ponte tra immaginario e quotidianità. Lucia Morelli – Nicola Salotti

Keane:

Il mio lavoro è concepito attorno alla figura che l’artista ricopre all’interno della comunità, e come tale ha il ruolo di stimolare la comunità stessa e di interagire con le capacità intellettive e creative delle persone. Un’ attività questa, sostenuta specificatamente dal pensiero di “arte non architettata” che considera il valore estetico dell’arte solo come ultimo passaggio, come rifinitura di quel linguaggio espresso in primis dal concetto che da l’input iniziale , una sorta di ordine di passaggi che interagiscono tra essi senza prevaricare ma che si considerano come sequenziali rivolti ad un unico fine, quello di creare una relazione comunicativa con la comunità.Un esempio è l’attività svolta da barganews che dal 1996 viaggia nel web avvalorandosi di questi concetti e facendo di se un canale comunicativo che si caratterizza di diversi aspetti , infatti è archivio, è social network, è blog, e giornale on-line che parla della comunità di cui si circonda.

Sergio Fini:

La pittura è il mezzo con cui “prevedo” il mio futuro; “NEW WORLDS” è la serie di lavori con la quale ho sentito la fine di un periodo, e l’inizio di una strada immensamente “piena”. Dopo quattro anni da ciò mi rendo conto quanto quei “mondi nuovi” siano stati profetici, non avevo idea del prezzo ne di quanto avrebbero reso (accrescimento spirituale), … adesso si. Molto, moltissimo sono costati, e moltissimo hanno regalato al mio sentire, una vera fortuna!

Non ha senso parlare di tecnica, di arrivare, ne d’altro;adesso niente ha valore se non il fatto che è nata, coscientemente, in me la “PITTURA EMOZIONALE” più pura e spontanea.

Nicola Salotti:

Dal momento della nascita tutta la nostra vita è pervasa dal desiderio di riprovare le sensazioni dell’estasi prenatale. E proprio da questa visione l’azione creativa, è un modo per ritrovare quelle sensazioni primordiali. Alla base della creatività c’è un elemento intrinseco di espressione e di comunicazione verso il così detto inconscio collettivo, per rendere possibile questo lo psicologo Carl Gustav Jung diceva che il canale comune era dovuto agli archetipi cioè le forme di manifestazione degli istinti , intesi non come appartenenti alla sfera biologica bensì alla sfera spirituale. Facendo mie queste considerazioni ho intrapreso questo percorso a seguito di una necessità che mi giungeva dettata dal mio inconscio , i lavori qui presenti sono il frutto di elaborazioni compositive che seguono la comprensione dello spazio pittorico e dell’uso del colore come mezzo espressivo autonomo . Queste rappresentazioni nascono da osservazioni, associazioni e sintesi di colore e forma che partono deliberatamente da segni casuali che poi evolvendosi si articolano in strutture compositivo-sintattiche che attingono direttamente alle reminescenze formali dettate dall’inconscio . Questa mia ricerca prende vita dalla volontà di capire il vero funzionamento del pensiero creativo in assenza di controllo esercitato dalla ragione , al di là di ogni preoccupazione estetica e morale.

The gallery will be called l’iNStallazione di Venti d’Arte and for their opening exhibition “Artefact” will feature the paintings of the following local artists: Keane, Sergio Fini and  Nicola Salotti. Nicola is one of the founder artists along with Lucia Morelli

What is causing the interest in finally seeing “The Nuns of Barga” paintings  in the flesh so to speak,  is probably the rumour that has been circulating the town for the last couple of days that one of the paintings that Keane has been working on over the past two years  has what is being called ” the Dorian Gray effect”

The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde, appearing as the lead story in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine on 20 June 1890. The novel tells of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is impressed by Dorian’s beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Talking in Basil’s garden, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil’s, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry’s world view. Espousing a new hedonism, Lord Henry suggests the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and fulfilment of the senses. Realizing that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, expressing his desire to sell his soul to ensure the portrait Basil has painted would age rather than himself. Dorian’s wish is fulfilled, plunging him into debauched acts.  The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered a work of classic gothic horror fiction with a strong Faustian theme.

Considering the story behind Oscar Wilde’s novel where the portrait served as a reminder of the effect each  act has upon his soul, with each sin displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of ageing,  it is easy to see why any link between the Nuns of Barga  and The Picture of Dorian Gray  would cause considerable controversy and so maybe now is the time to set the record straight.

Barganews yesterday talked to Keane in his studio about the controversy.

barganews: ” The first question really ought to be about the painting which some people claimed has the “Dorian Gray effect” …  what is going on here?

Keane: “  first off,  just let me say that Barga is a small city -  in fact it is the smallest city in Italy -  once rumours start,  it’s very difficult  to know where they originated from  but this has to be one of the most bizarre of recent times.  So to facts -  yes I do have a painting that I have been working on for the last two years.  It has been a work in progress right up until it was taken to the framers last week.  It shows two nuns, seen from behind with the one on the right turning slightly towards the nun on the left  in what could be a conversation.  For most people outside of Barga it is simply two nuns  but for many people in the city,  the figure on the left is unmistakable one of the nuns who left Barga two years ago.  It is a work in progress because over the last two years I have been gradually painting that nun out of focus.  The nun on the right is sharply defined and in focus -  as time goes on,  the one on the left has becoming less distinct and out of focus.  It is meant to a pictorical rendition of the passing of time and the effect of memory. No magic -   no “Dorian Gray effect”,  just a simple painterly device.”

barganews: “well thanks for clearing that one up.  Maybe we can all rest peacefully in her beds once again.   You say you have been working over two years on this project,  how many paintings are there actually going to be in the exhibition?”

Keane: ” actually not all that many considering how much time has been devoted to this project. After thousands of photographs,  and hundreds of drawings and sketches, I really only have about a dozen finished paintings.

The exhibition “Artefact“  in Fornaci is a group exhibition along with my good friend Sergio Fini,  with whom I have wanted to have an exhibition together for many years,  finally it looks as though it’s going to happen and Nicola Salotti,  whose work I have admired from a distance for ages -   now I get to see it close up.  The space in the new gallery in Fornaci is slightly limited as both Sergio and I tend to work on large-scale paintings and so at the moment it’s a little difficult to say just how many of the Nuns of Barga paintings will actually be hung.  Before Christmas I took five large paintings to be framed.  I expect only two or three will finally be put up on the walls but with a break from a long tradition of making large paintings,  I also took five small paintings, again part of the the Nuns of Barga series but these are of a much more personal scale and nature and generally work that I would not exhibit publicly.  There is a good chance that two or three of these will end up on the gallery walls as there seems to be some interest in just how these paintings are constructed.

barganews: “  they do say there is no such thing as bad publicity just publicity,  so maybe the controversy around these paintings  could be seen as a good thing? “

Keane: ” hmm,  maybe.  I find myself in a difficult position with the subject of these paintings as the nuns do occupy a particular place and role in this community. As the community changes so too does their position and relevance to Barga and its citizens.  I wanted to explore and document that fragile moment of change.  These are not Disneyesque characters but real women in a changing world.  The furthest thing from my mind would be to simply make caricatures of them.  Hopefully on 10th January we can see whether I succeeded or not.

“Artefact” vuole essere il primo contenitore, sottoforma di mostra collettiva che l’iNStallazione di Venti d’arte propone al pubblico .
“Artefact” o Artefatto come si deduce dalla parola stessa fa riferimento al suo doppio senso, in un gioco di significati che interagiscono tra loro e che propongono una doppia sensibilità di espressione , questa collettiva infatti non è altro che un connubio tra codici espressivi dei diversi artisti partecipanti che con le loro volontà singolari intraprendono un viaggio tra colori e forme del tutto soggettivo ma legato ad una comunione di intenti che tendono a produrre manufatti d’arte, o artefatti.

The original exhibition was practically boycotted by the administration of the city who deemed it in bad taste.  The paintings were shown briefly in the Altana restaurant before they whisked off to an exhibition in Florence.   They were on display for a month before returning to Barga  where they were put into storage and collected dust for the next four years  in the corner of Keane’s  studio.  Apart from one or two private collectors,  none of the paintings  have seen the light of day since.

Hopefully some things have changed, the world has moved on  and very few people would bat an eyelid at some oil paintings of underwear.

Just one look at Italian television over the last five years should be enough for people to see that there is very little danger of corrupting anybody with an oil painting.

For an in depth study of just what the paintings were actually hoping to achieve please read the Frank Viviano article printed in full below.

There are eight artists exhibiting in the exhibition – Giancarlo Borgioli, Luciana Pierini, Gabriele Levrini, Lucia Pedri; all from the Garfagnana area  and Sandra Rigali, Caterina Salvi, Fabrizio Da Prato and Keane; all from the Barga area.

The exhibition is at the Palazzo Azzi in the main piazza- Piazza Umberto in Castelnuovo and will run from the 19th December until 31st January.

The inauguration will be at 5pm this Saturday 19th December.

[View with PicLens]

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What you notice, before anything else, is that the subjects of Keane`s brush have an unlikely beauty. They are banners aflutter in the shifting Garfagnana winds, their allegiances announced in the language of high art: colour, form, composition, kinetic tension. Their subtext is the wonderful diversity of human experience, ranging from the dizzyingly erotic to the downright practical, and capturing, as graphically as could be imagined, our collective journey from infant to elderly. Mutande, their Italian name, is derived from the verb mutare, “to change” — and it seems far closer to the remarkably dignified spirit of these paintings than its giggling English equivalent, “knickers.”

Painting, in its most general definition, is an act of shared observation — the visual statement of the painter, in conversation with the visual reactions of an audience. In that sense, Keane`s “Mutande di Barga” is an essay on the principal exchange of his art. But it is also an essay on the protocol of observation itself.

Put simply, mutande are everywhere in Barga, shouting out our secrets from clotheslines and drying racks strung in full sight on nearly every home; but the moot understanding is that they are not supposed to be seen.

Few artefacts of our material culture say more about us — more about our bodies, stripped to their last shield against the naked truth of age and physical decline, more about our most intimate acts and fantasies. For that very reason, the expectation is that we will not observe them, in any meaningful way. We will not “read” them as would an anthropologist or a voyeur.

In Keane`s own view, the subject of “Mutande” is community, a central motif in his work for a quarter century, explored from the 20th century housing estates of his native London to the Ming courtyards of Nanjing, China, and from the sylvan hamlets of Finland to the fishing villages of Pantelleria island off the North African coast. Nowhere has he investigated the meaning of community in greater depth than Barga, his residence for 16 years, documented in hundreds of paintings and in thousands of photographs. His intention, his obsession, is to assemble a complete portrait of the town, comprised of individual portraits of its more than ten thousand people.

Community, as pictured in this massive undertaking, is about work and leisure, about who governs and who is governed, about property and its rights, citizenship and its responsibilities; in short, it is about the explicit, formal contracts that bind individuals into a group, a society.

Yet community is also — and often more powerfully — about the implicit contracts that bind us, the unspoken accords. It is about the Mutande of Barga.

Over the course of a lifetime in a town as small and densely built as this, neighbours come to know each other more intimately than do many husbands and wives in the transient suburbs and anonymous high rises of the contemporary urban world. Over the progression of years recorded by their mutande, the Barghigiani absorb an infinitely detailed and intuitive version of the portrait that compels Keane; they grow ever more closely acquainted with their neighbours`acquired habits and inherited pasts, their loves won and lost, their joys and sorrows.

They are bound, tightly, in the contract symbolized by those colourful banners waving from every home, the contract that says, in effect, “va bene, I can hang my secrets out before your windows, let them take the air and sun, because you know me — and I trust you not to look.”

Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5

Just what is the collective noun for a group of nuns .. a flock of nuns, a gaggle .. a pride maybe ?

Very rarely is it possible to spot a single nun in the streets of the city. The main group comprising of three very aged women, all diminutive in stature, and all three of formidable character.

Local residents, describe these three nuns, as always appearing aged. It would seem that nobody can remember them as young women. And there lies the problem, the young Italian women are no longer becoming nuns. It is very difficult to find recent data on the precise number of nuns living and working in Italy but their numbers are decreasing rapidly and even the new novices coming in from Africa and Asia can no longer fill the gap.

Shortly, this compact group of dark clad women moving ghost like through the streets of Barga will be just that – ghostly memories.

[View with PicLens]

12►

… and what about the work that was being done last month outside the studio ?

1982  Dudley Art Gallery, Dudley  England
1983  Bournville Painters, Bournville  England
1984  Gallery, Aix en Provence  France
1988  Sala ex Archivio, Castelnuovo Garfagnana  Italy
1989  Pantelleria, Trapani  Italy
1990  Fine Art University, Nanjing  China
1991  Italian Trade Centre, London  England
1992  Casa di Dante, Florence  Italy
1993  Palazzo della Cultura, Latina  Italy
1994  Cardoso Art, Cardoso  Italy
1995  Hijack Artvertising, Dublin/London/Milano/New York  USA
1996  Hijack Artvertising, Colman Fine Art, London  England
1996  Terre d’Acqua Biennale, Vercelli  Italy
1996  Terra d’Acqua, Treviso  Italy
1996   G7 Group, Sternen, Fluelen  Switzerland
1997  Altsadthalle, Zug  Switzerland
1997  Salle des Voutes, Cassis  France
1998  Varkaus Art Museum, Varkaus,  Finland
1999  Joensuu, River Art  Finland
1999  “Candy Factory” Yokohoma, Japan
2000   Sottopassaggio73, Livorno  Italy
2003  Signs at Casa Cordati, Barga  Italy
2006 The Mutande of Barga, Florence, Italy
2008 Margini – stone installations at 1600 metres, La Pania, Italy
2010 The Nuns of Barga, “Artefact”, Fornaci di Barga, Italy

Luca Galeotti from Il Giornale di Barga shines a light on the subject

A short exhibition (lasting only three days) of some very dark umbrellas at the L’osteria in Piazza Angelio opened this evening. The artist Keane who painted a series of bright cheerful and sunny umbrellas for the Lake Angels Soul Festival this summer has gone in a completely different direction and produced instead for Halloween what could only be described as very, very dark images.

He is also testing his luck with the superstition that umbrellas should never be opened inside the house, bad luck will follow – in this case not once but 17 times.

Keane was determined to change the experience for people using the L’osteria over the next couple of days and constructed a kind of false ceiling made up of umbrellas just centimeters above their heads.

The lights the also lowered and a large amount of sawdust was spread across the floors the deaden the sound.

Visitors to the exhibition are offered a torch which then can use to cast some light on the images on show.

The images painted on the umbrellas are all loosely based around the Los Caprichos aquatint prints created by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya in 1797 and 1798.

[View with PicLens]

Los Caprichos are a set of 80 aquatint prints created by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya in 1797 and 1798, and published as an album in 1799. The prints were an artistic experiment: a medium for Goya’s condemnation of the universal follies and foolishness in the Spanish society in which he lived. The criticisms are far-ranging and acidic; he speaks against the predominance of superstition, the ignorance and inabilities of the various members of the ruling class, pedagogical short-comings, marital mistakes, and the decline of rationality.

Some of the prints have anticlerical themes. Goya described the series as depicting “the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual”.

The work was an enlightened, tour-de-force critique of 18th-century Spain, and humanity in general. The informal style, as well as the depiction of contemporary society found in Caprichos, makes them – and Goya himself – a precursor to the modernist movement almost a century later. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters in particular has attained an iconic status.

All of the umbrellas used in this exhibition were collected in Barga Vecchia after people had thrown them away when damaged. Once upon a time they would have been dumped but the combination of the recent death of the last umbrella repairer in Barga Vecchia, Carlo Sacco and the onslaught of the throwaway culture means that they are binned and rebought rather than repaired.

The exhibition will remain on view to the public for the next three days.

Although nobody ever took responsibility for the paintings it was no secret that the artist Keane has been working for the last two years* on a series of paintings based around the Nuns of Barga and so most people assumed it was a continuation of that work.

What people were not prepared for was when one of the painted figures then just disappeared during the night when no witnesses were around.  Was it painted over ? First there were two, then one.

As it turned out they were not painted directly onto the walls but instead were painted on paper that was then glued to the wall with flour paste.

[View with PicLens]

Last night the second nun vanished like the first. The image being cleanly ripped off the wall whole  … no clues as to just who was responsible … is there somebody out there collecting images of nuns or did somebody dislike the images so much that that felt they had to remove them?

They have gone but strangely enough they have left behind a a nun like outline on the wall where they once were .. a ghostly nun after- image.

It kind of fits with the work that Keane has been doing somehow ……. this is what he said in May of last year -

The work is based around a small group of people who have been living and working in Barga for generations, but now as a group are close to extinction – the nuns of Barga.

Their numbers can be counted on one hand, and they always seemed to move around in a group. Just what is the collective noun for a group of nuns .. a flock of nuns, a gaggle .. a pride maybe ? Very rarely is it possible to spot a single nun in the streets of the city.

The main group comprising of three very aged women, all diminutive in stature, and all three of formidable character.

Local residents, describe these three nuns, as always appearing aged. It would seem that nobody can remember them as young women. And there lies the problem, the young Italian women are no longer becoming nuns.

It is very difficult to find recent data on the precise number of nuns living and working in Italy but their numbers are decreasing rapidly and even the new novices coming in from Africa and Asia can no longer fill the gap.

Shortly, this compact group of dark clad women moving ghost like through the streets of Barga will be just that – ghostly memories

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pTqxbVEPys

* his interest in this subject dates back more than two years as this short film on youtube is from sept 2005.

[View with PicLens]

Work in progress 2008 – 2009 – more here

Margini – stone installations at 1600 metres 2007

The Nuns of Barga – drawings/oil paintings 2006

The mutande of Barga – oil paintings 2005

Generated collision images – digital 2004

Tulse Luper Suitcases- images for Peter Greenaway 2004

Images created by text 2004

Leaning Tower of Pisa – taking back that which is ours – photographs 2003

147 CAI markings – paintings 2003

Da Vinci Table – painted sculpture 2003

Water Decay – drawings and prints 2003

Hands of the Artists – installation/performance for two artists – Livorno 2003

Signs at Casa Cordati 2002

World Cup television supporters 2002

The Decaying Site Project 2001

Blowing up Bin Laden 2000

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-a-cream 2000

200 Yellow Bicycles of Joensuu Finland 2000

tragica fine di Superbi Vascelli – Livorno Italy 1999

Body Partsan artists at work installation destroyed by ignorance 1999

The Barga Faces Project 4000 faces of the people of a small city in Italy 1999

Oma Maa Mansikka Muu Maa MustikkaFinland 1998

Packets sound poem Japan and Italy 1998

The Death of Paper Finland 1997

CUSEEMESEX safe sex on the net 1995

T.V 20 television destroyed monoprints and oil paintings 1994

The Carmobile e-mail address 1993

Window on Gallicano 1992

The Umbrellas of Barga 1990

Paintings from China pastels from Nanjing 1988

Pantelleria oil paintings from the black pearl of the mediterranean 1985

Hands on election day photographs from Fosciandora Italy 1985

Fosciandora 7 years work painting lanscapes in a small village in Tuscany, Italy

1983-1984 Toured Europe with own street theatre “Lord Lucan’s Travelling Box”
Since 1985 Living and working in Italy as a painter
1991 Elected member of Fine Art Society, Florence Italy
1992 With Fabrizio Da Prato and Tiziana Fontana formed “Artists at Work”
1996 started barganews.com

1982  Dudley Art Gallery, Dudley  England
1983  Bournville Painters, Bournville  England
1984  Gallery, Aix en Provence  France
1988  Sala ex Archivio, Castelnuovo Garfagnana  Italy
1989  Pantelleria, Trapani  Italy
1990  Fine Art University, Nanjing  China
1991  Italian Trade Centre, London  England
1992  Casa di Dante, Florence  Italy
1993  Palazzo della Cultura, Latina  Italy
1994  Cardoso Art, Cardoso  Italy
1995  Hijack Artvertising, Dublin/London/Milano/New York  USA
1996  Hijack Artvertising, Colman Fine Art, London  England
1996  Terre d’Acqua Biennale, Vercelli  Italy
1996  Terra d’Acqua, Treviso  Italy
1996   G7 Group, Sternen, Fluelen  Switzerland
1997  Altsadthalle, Zug  Switzerland
1997  Salle des Voutes, Cassis  France
1998  Varkaus Art Museum, Varkaus,  Finland
1999  Joensuu, River Art  Finland
1999  “Candy Factory” Yokohoma, Japan
2000   Sottopassaggio73, Livorno  Italy
2003  Signs at Casa Cordati, Barga  Italy
2006 The Mutande of Barga, Florence, Italy
2008 Margini – stone installations at 1600 metres, La Pania, Italy
2010 The Nuns of Barga, “Artefact”, Fornaci di Barga, Italy

  ]]> http://www.giornaledibarganews.com/2008/10/18/keane/feed/ 1 http://www.giornaledibarganews.com/2008/09/22/margini-high-art-at-1600-metres/ http://www.giornaledibarganews.com/2008/09/22/margini-high-art-at-1600-metres/#comments Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:26:59 +0000 keane http://www.giornaledibarganews.com/?p=5653

For the last two years there has been an art project in preparation to put an artist in residence in all of the rifugi in Tuscany (the rifugi are huts that are dotted around on the mountainside’s to give refuge to climbers and walkers.) This project known as “Margini” has been prepared by the Associazione Gestori Rifugi Alpi Apuane e Appennini and a group of local artists who have been active in this area for many years.

After two conferences in Lucca  (articles here) which gave space and time to the politicians to talk about the aims of the project, finally this summer “Margini” moved into a more proactive stage with the first pilot scheme putting five artists in the Rifugio Rossi on La Pania – the mountain which stands over Barga and dominates this whole valley.

[View with PicLens]

During July and August and September the five artists; Claudia Haberkern, Silvia Magrini, Fabrizio Da Prato, Stefano Giovacchini and Keane have been staying at the Rifugio Rossi and making art out in the open on the mountainside.

At the end of this month the project comes to an end and all the installations so far mounted will be dismantled and the mountain will return to its original pristine condition.
The “Margini” project has not been being without its critics though as some viewers have found the work difficult to understand or even recognise as art work.

Some even expressed doubts as to the value of art works on the mountain and one or two even going so far as to show their displeasure by destroying sections of the work. A 9 m long wooden installation by the Fabrizio Da Prato featuring what he termed a “pioneer species” which was erected close to the path leading to the summit of La Pania was destroyed (images here) along with parts of another installation by the Lucca artist Silvia Magrini. (images here)

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Silvia Magrini

The subtitle for the whole project “artistic exploration” pretty well summed up what most of the artists were actually trying to do: explore the area and their reactions to it rather than actually making or producing finished art products.

The German artist Claudia Haberkern for instance opened up a cave which had been sealed for generations. Known locally as the “cheese cave” it had been used, as the name suggests, as a cool damp place to store cheese. Her installation inside the cave was only visible to those brave enough to enter and explore for themselves. (images here)

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Claudia Haberkern

Another Lucca artist Stefano Giovacchini experimented with patterns on the rocks using compacted dried leaves. Most of his work only lasting a few days before the sometimes extreme weather conditions at 1600 m returned the rocks to their original condition. (images here)

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Stefano Giovacchini

Keane who in the past (images here from 2003) has exhibited paintings based on the painted signs used by CAI to mark the trails across the mountains continued this theme this time using the small stacks of stones which the shepherds used to mark the paths across the mountainside when conditions made visibility poor.

Keane’s path did not finish on the mountain but continued down into the valley with the final stack of stones appearing miraculously in the middle of Aristo’s bar in Barga Vecchia. (images here)

A reference to Bruna Cordati’s book – “Il Paese di Pietra” perhaps?

The Margini website can be seen here

Barga shows the way — The following was on the front page of the Independent newspaper in the UK this morning as it reported on the new phenomenon in the states as they look for new/old methods to combat the damage to our climate though greenhouse gases. What could be more environmentally friendly than hanging out your laundry in the fresh air? A movement is stirring all across North America to reinstate the venerable clothesline and ditch the dryer.

The clothes-peg is making a comeback (not plastic, please, but those sturdy wooden ones with springs your mother used to collect). The reason, of course, is concern about global warming but the growing global movement has met outrage in America from those who want to keep their neighbourhoods knicker-free.

The drive to reinstate the clothes lines is suddenly getting a lot of people’s attention.Saturday, believe it or not, was “National Hanging Out Day” in the US and it was not an invitation for kids to assemble at the shopping mall. (They do that anyway.) It was about damp whites and was the brainwave of an advocacy group based in New Hampshire called Project Laundry List. (site here) For its motto it borrows from Benjamin Franklin. “We must all hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately.”

Its mission is to educate. With our harried existences, most of us do not think twice about using whatever labour-saving devices are at hand. Tumble dryers certainly fall into that category. But most of us are beginning to worry also about what we can do in our own homes to reduce our so-called carbon footprint. In this country, households count for about a quarter of all the greenhouse gases wafting into our atmosphere. Project Laundry List will tell you that dryers account for about 6 per cent of energy consumption in a typical American home, just behind fridges and lights. Use them regularly and they will generate emissions roughly equal to driving five cars.

Changing to green electricity means paying a bit more on your monthly bill. Resurrecting the clothes-line should be appealing because it implies no additional monetary costs. How many other opportunities do you see out there for cutting your carbon footprint substantially for free? “A clothes line is not a solar panel or a Prius,” notes Alexander Lee, the founder of Project Laundry List. “It’s something that everyone can afford.” It will cost you time of course, but fresh air is good for you and your clothes.

But the Right to Dry movement, as it has been named, is meeting resistance. In fact, it has detonated warfare in many communities. In the red corner is the smattering of homeowners across the land who have seen the error of their tumble-drying ways and are erecting either lines or those umbrella-like contraptions that were once popular in Britain.

In the blue corner are their neighbours who consider knickers in the wind a blight. For these people (yes, I was one of them), seeing clothes on a line somehow denotes poverty and an absence of sophistication. It’s a class thing. Neighbourhoods with washing in the gardens are not nice neighbourhoods. Heavens, it could even be lowering the values of the homes all around them.

Not helping is the fact that for many in this country, their home is not exactly their castle. Nearly 60 million Americans live in communities, usually called housing associations, where occupying a unit – whether apartment, row-house or even detached house – means also accepting a range of regulations regarding upkeep and general appearances, such as lawn-mowing and paint colours. Most of these associations also impose a strict no-clothes-line rule. But inside these associations rebellions are starting to erupt. In Concord, New Hampshire, for instance, there is the case of Mary Lou Sayer, a grandmother in her 80s who sought permission to begin hanging out her clothes in the assisted-living complex she calls home after hearing a talk by Mr Lee. She was turned down and for now suspends her dripping smalls from her dining-room light fixture and opens the windows. She is considering hanging a line outside anyway in protest. “Most of my friends are taking environmental issues seriously,” she says.

But Mr Lee believes that the logic of switching off the tumble dryer will eventually prevail against the Nimby forces of not in my – or rather your – back yard. Partly, he says, it is about changing popular perceptions. Clothes lines need to be seen as acceptable once again, even praiseworthy. “We want Martha [Stewart] and Oprah [Winfrey] to make the clothesline into a pennant of eco-chic,” he said, “instead of a flag of poverty”.

His group is also spearheading an effort to persuade state and local legislatures to pass laws overriding individual housing association rules. Pro-clothes line laws are now pending in Vermont, Connecticut and Colorado. One was also tabled in New Hampshire but was recently thrown out in committee.

“People think it’s silly, but what’s silly is to worry so much about having to look at your neighbours’ undies that you would prevent them from conserving energy. We’re not making a big deal over clothes lines; we’re making a big deal over global warming.” – state senator, Dick McCormack.

For now, just two states, Utah and Florida, have laws on the books specifically protecting the right of homeowners to flaunt their smalls in the garden. How much longer it will be for one of the initiatives to find favour is hard to say. But there is encouraging news from just across the border where the Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, just last Friday introduced a law that precisely overrides the ability of housing associations to ban clothes lines. “There’s a whole generation of kids growing up today who think a clothes line is a wrestling move,” the Premier said. “We want parents to have the choice to use the wind and the sun to dry their clothes free.”

Mr McGuinty took the action partly in response to a petition from Phyllis Morris, the Mayor of Aurora, Ontario, who had been made aware that numerous ecologically conscious residents in the town were chafing at clothesline restrictions. She took up their cause without a moment’s hesitation. “If we can’t change simple stuff like this, we’ll never handle the big things we need to do for the planet,” she said of her petition which declared the clothes-lines bans a “barrier to conservation”. “People say, ‘Oh, Phyllis, you want to turn women back into the laundry lady’, and I say, ‘Wrong: this is about rights. It’s about the environment.”

Recently, I was tempted to try out a new brand of washing powder from Tide that promises a “clean breeze” scent, described as “the fresh scent of laundry line-dried in a clean breeze”. How daft is that? As far as I know, there is not a thing to stop me from junking the tumble-dryer upstate. Which means I have no excuse but to knock on Bud’s door and borrow some pegs. Article on the front page of The Independent newspaper UK by David Usborne

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Be sure to read the article written by Frank Viviano about the paintings on The Mutande of Barga site – here