Monitor, Rome

Monitor proposes a curated project that focuses on the body and its involvement in the act of the artistic creation with a presentation of two artists: Jesse Ash and Tomaso de Luca.

The Coronation emerges from the reflection on the loser, the one who celebrates their defeat. The artist made a crown in copper and then portrayed himself forty times while he was trying to wear this object in different ways. The object of celebration, the crown of Caesar, is turned into something incoherent, useless, contrary to its positive and monumental value. For Tomaso it is necessary to celebrate the defeat, to detect and assimilate the shadows, to oppose our capacity of being losers to a pattern of victories and success. experiencing a disaster is a seed of diversity (as the artist wrote).

The involvement of the body through the use of an object is a primary element of the work by Jesse Ash, that adds an element of aleatory to the creative process: News from Nowhere is a series of charcoal drawings on paper where a scrunched up newspaper page (the international section of a London paper) is thrown on to white drawing paper. The random composition of the drawings are marked by the shadow of the object – rendered in charcoal and displayed to simulate a meteoric shower.