Shay Frisch

Shay Frisch – campo 100535 B/N
Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna e contemporanea, Rome
9 ottobre, 2012 – 27 gennaio, 2013

The work of the Israeli artist consists in the creation of electric fields and in their interaction with the surrounding environment. The campo, or field, is generated by the assembly of modules, electrical conductors, through which energy runs, thus becoming “form.” These industrial, though commonly sold, components maintain within an electrical charge, whose perennial activity is detected by lights.

For the event, Frisch presents to the public an installation that unfolds across four rooms, on the first floor of the museum.

As the curator writes: “The system of various fields in tension makes a single electromagnetic field vibrate that permeates the rooms of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, which host the exhibition . . . thus in the first room a continuous black band is formed, a monochrome surface with electricity under, initially without an outlet but gradually with cuts, slits, slashes of light in close succession . . . Slowly, the idea of field alters the rooms, growing in size, after the first and second, to produce in the third a sort of supernova, an explosion of luminous energy in a chamber cosmos with horizontal slashes that refer to the distance of infinity. In the fourth room the field closes in upon itself and envelopes the viewer, shifting him to the epicenter of a powerful electromagnetic field . . .”

“. . . Shay Frisch works upon the ambivalence of a creative furor that plays between skillful revealing and energy sublimation, between the noise of the light and the silence of the module, between composure and power . . .

. . . turning on both the spirituality of form and the modularity of reason, before our eyes there appears an inhabited silent field, a profound reason.”