Visitors to Punta della Dogana, François Pinault’s second exhibition venue in Venice, have over a period of seven years become accustomed to its usual, minimalist use of the space, with sparse displays, fragile and ephemeral objects, and surreal installations. The current exhibition, titled “Accrochage” (“hanging”) by curator Caroline Bourgeois, is no exception.With 70 works belonging to the French collector but never shown before, and no definite theme except an invitation to look, the exhibition is a contemplative experience that uses a vast array of installations, objects, photographs, paintings and videos to let the viewer focus on his own reactions. Art here is used to help us “escape from permanent confusion,” in a sort of visual decluttering.The show opens with two impressive untitled pieces by Pier Paolo Calzolari: one from 1970 is a long line of mattresses that seem to be bracing themselves against the wall. The other one, from 1989-90, looks like three huge windows made of iron and copper suddenly opened in one of the walls, like an altar to unknown gods, like a passage into a different dimension. Heading towards the stairs, the visitors literallly bumps into Cerith Wyn Evans’s “We are in Yucatan and every unpredicted thing” chandelier from 1992, that lights up rythmically while a chirping of birds fills the ambience.Among the highlights of the show, in the ground floor’s “Cube” room, Venice’s Accademia’s students have reproduced the entire mural “#343” by Sol Lewitt: a square, a circle, a triangle, a cross, a trapezoid and a parallelogram, all black and 6 metrers high against a solid white background. Here, the light falling from the skylight designed by Tadao Ando plays with the painted shapes, projecting a second layer of geometries over the walls.The other main room on the ground floor is occupied by Goshka Macuga’s “Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not”, twin tapestries from 2012, 17 metres long, conceived for dOCUMENTA (13) to be shown simultaneously in Kassel and Kabul.On both floors, monographic rooms devoted to Fabio Mauri, Michel Parmentier, Florian Pumholst, Niele Toroni, and Peter Dreher with his hundreds of painted glasses of water (half empty, half full?) create very different environments, most of which monochromatic, linked only by a certain gentleness of the works, and by the sounds that permeate the entire space: where the chirping birds by Cerith Wyn Evans fade, a piano plays. It’s the echo of Philippe Parreno’s playful “Quasi Objects” installation: a glass platform where an automated piano is playing alone, surrounded by a room full of childish, inflatable objects.This reference to childhood and naivety seems to culminate in Charles Ray’s “Young Man,” placed in the belvedere of Punta della Dogana, looking out, but is abruptly contradicted by the only aggressive work on show: Pierre Huyghe’s “Human Mask”. A 19 minute film from 2014 shows a monkey, head covered by mask and wig to look like a young Asian girl, left alone in an abandoned Chinese restaurant - cockroaches and rotting food populated by worms included - during a thunderstorm. Her growing anxiety, semi-human movements and patent fear abduct the viewer from his former state of contemplative relaxation. It takes a good 10 minute staring at Edward Krasinski’s minimalist blue lines, tracing walls and doors, to be able to exit again in the serene Venetian daylight.“Accrochage” is at Punta della Dogana, Venice, through November 11. www.palazzograssi.it
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