In the beginning all was black
Jane de Almeida
Aldo Tambellini is an Italian-Brazilian-American artist, internationally recognized for his pioneering work that explored the new technologies of the 1960s, combining slides, photographs, films and also painting, sculpture, audio and performance.
The exhibition In the beginning all was black, carried out online, presents unique works by Tambellini in Brazil, with a wide variety of media and elements to be explored by an audience that sees for the first time the pulsating set of a singular work. Along with this collection, originating from the Harvard Films Archive, postcards and letters are being exhibited, presenting an internationally little-known relationship between Tambellini and São Paulo.
In recent years, Aldo Tambellini has exhibited his works in important centers such as Tate Modern (2018 – 2020), MoMA (2013), ZKM (2017), Center Georges Pompidou (2012) and the Venice Biennale (2015). This recent recognition reflects his pioneering works on the New York art scene during the 1950s and 1960s, with pieces dedicated to political activism and philosophical concerns about the artistic community.
The exhibition In the beginning all was black, produced in partnership with The Aldo Tambellini Foundation and CASANOVA, shows the Black Series films (1965-1969), as well as a set of photographic works and audio-poems, grouped online for an overview of the artist’s prolific work.
Tambellini intervened in the film’s physicality, to discuss the materiality of the medium, scraping the print film and using chemistry and paint to repaint the pictures. Starting from philosophical questions about black matter, his artistic production finds a strong political activism of the black movement with the voices of demonstrations of the 60s in the United States. His films combine sounds as varied as an African drums and commentary on the murder of Bobby Kennedy, abstract images of faces of politicians and blacks, as well as television images. The viewer will be surprised by the thematic and visual currentness of his methods in the 1960s, such as racism, protests, split screens, projections with multiple screens. However, the disquieting compositions of imagery and sound abstractions give to his work a power that transposes historical curiosity.
His audios, in addition to poetics, are reflections on art and politics – largely on the politics of the arts – that have found an unusual way of expressing the voice of the American citizen and the artist. A selection of these poems and essays was published in 2017 by Grady Miller Books.
Above all, there is an important reference in Tambellini’s works: the combination of the concept of black in different nuances – the black of racism, the black as a principle of atomic physics, the black as the beginning of human civilization, the black of the frame, and also as a blind spot. The film’s negatives and images articulate different forms of obsessive black abstraction, highlighting what Tambellini says about his films as “paintings in movement”.
In addition to the films, two series of abstract photographs, called Videograms and Lumagrams will be shown. They are images made with direct printing of the video screen without using a camera. The exhibition will also have the privilege of presenting the letters and postcards of the period in which Tambellini lived in São Paulo, with vivid insight into the culture of his Brazilian ancestors. His paternal Italian grandfather, Paul, was a coffee grower in São Paulo, where his father John was born. In 1983, after his presentation at the Bienal de São Paulo, as a representative of the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Aldo Tambellini explored the region and wrote letters to his companion at the time, reporting the colors, sounds, sensations he experienced at that time, as well as his artistic encounters with the pioneers of “electronic” art of the time in Brazil. The audience will be able to witness a genuine cultural encounter by an American-Italian artist who also claims to be Brazilian. In the beginning all was black has the privilege of calling him an “American-Italian-Brazilian artist”.
The show will be available online from October 1st until the end of December 2020. During this period, it will be updated with a series of video interviews with curators, besides a special live conversation with Aldo Tambellini on a day to be scheduled.
In the beginning all was black
Jane de Almeida
Aldo Tambellini is an Italian-Brazilian-American artist, internationally recognized for his pioneering work that explored the new technologies of the 1960s, combining slides, photographs, films and also painting, sculpture, audio and performance.
The exhibition In the beginning all was black, carried out online, presents unique works by Tambellini in Brazil, with a wide variety of media and elements to be explored by an audience that sees for the first time the pulsating set of a singular work. Along with this collection, originating from the Harvard Films Archive, postcards and letters are being exhibited, presenting an internationally little-known relationship between Tambellini and São Paulo.
In recent years, Aldo Tambellini has exhibited his works in important centers such as Tate Modern (2018 – 2020), MoMA (2013), ZKM (2017), Center Georges Pompidou (2012) and the Venice Biennale (2015). This recent recognition reflects his pioneering works on the New York art scene during the 1950s and 1960s, with pieces dedicated to political activism and philosophical concerns about the artistic community.
The exhibition In the beginning all was black, produced in partnership with The Aldo Tambellini Foundation and CASANOVA, shows the Black Series films (1965-1969), as well as a set of photographic works and audio-poems, grouped online for an overview of the artist’s prolific work.
Tambellini intervened in the film’s physicality, to discuss the materiality of the medium, scraping the print film and using chemistry and paint to repaint the pictures. Starting from philosophical questions about black matter, his artistic production finds a strong political activism of the black movement with the voices of demonstrations of the 60s in the United States. His films combine sounds as varied as an African drums and commentary on the murder of Bobby Kennedy, abstract images of faces of politicians and blacks, as well as television images. The viewer will be surprised by the thematic and visual currentness of his methods in the 1960s, such as racism, protests, split screens, projections with multiple screens. However, the disquieting compositions of imagery and sound abstractions give to his work a power that transposes historical curiosity.
His audios, in addition to poetics, are reflections on art and politics – largely on the politics of the arts – that have found an unusual way of expressing the voice of the American citizen and the artist. A selection of these poems and essays was published in 2017 by Grady Miller Books.
Above all, there is an important reference in Tambellini’s works: the combination of the concept of black in different nuances – the black of racism, the black as a principle of atomic physics, the black as the beginning of human civilization, the black of the frame, and also as a blind spot. The film’s negatives and images articulate different forms of obsessive black abstraction, highlighting what Tambellini says about his films as “paintings in movement”.
In addition to the films, two series of abstract photographs, called Videograms and Lumagrams will be shown. They are images made with direct printing of the video screen without using a camera. The exhibition will also have the privilege of presenting the letters and postcards of the period in which Tambellini lived in São Paulo, with vivid insight into the culture of his Brazilian ancestors. His paternal Italian grandfather, Paul, was a coffee grower in São Paulo, where his father John was born. In 1983, after his presentation at the Bienal de São Paulo, as a representative of the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Aldo Tambellini explored the region and wrote letters to his companion at the time, reporting the colors, sounds, sensations he experienced at that time, as well as his artistic encounters with the pioneers of “electronic” art of the time in Brazil. The audience will be able to witness a genuine cultural encounter by an American-Italian artist who also claims to be Brazilian. In the beginning all was black has the privilege of calling him an “American-Italian-Brazilian artist”.
The show will be available online from October 1st until the end of December 2020. During this period, it will be updated with a series of video interviews with curators, besides a special live conversation with Aldo Tambellini on a day to be scheduled.