Ermes-Ermes, Vienna
Nicole Gravier, Diego Marcon, Nicola Pecoraro
Ermes-Ermes presents a new series of drawings by Nicola Pecoraro and a video installation by Diego Marcon, beside Nicole Gravier’s works, the highlight of this dialogue is built by the friction of their practice approach.
Nicola Pecoraro (1978, IT) works in different mediums, often investigating material processes, and the way objects can be perceived according to the information they contain.
Recently his studio practice has focused on drawing, and sound-based works, which, while still being connected to the process-based nature of his previous works, seem to be a point of departure towards an altogether different form of narrative.
Diego Marcon’s (1985, IT) research focuses on the relation between reality and representation, investigating the ontology of the moving image and its possibility to be a tool of knowledge of the real through the phantasmagoric.
His work tries to be the contact point between a cold, structural approach to cinema and a sentimental, secular one, typical of movies’ genres such as horror and cartoons, whose topoi—isolated from any narrative context—are explored and stressed to give shape to an uncanny dimension.
Nicole Gravier (1949, FR), studied at the Académie de Beaux-Arts in Aix-en-Provence and the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, graduating in painting.
Already in her first works, Gravier started using photography as a media to investigate the stereotypes of communication, focusing her work on the demystification of “myths and clichés” propagated by mass media.
Gravier achieved an act of decoding of the images employed by the media, which are recreated inserting ironic elements that disturb and stimulate reflection in the viewer, inspiring the emergence of new meaning. The photos relate to women’s representations proposed by magazines, advertisements and photo novels; from the 70s she chose photography as a privileged medium precisely to deconstruct such tropes.
In the series Mythes et Clichés (1976-1980), she appropriates the linguistic code and the frames proper to the photo novel to focus on the discrepancy of contents, playing with the feminine stereotypes, linked to the dimension of romantic sentiment and family life, and the equally stereotypical male figure, connected to reason and political action.