On 24 August will be inaugurated my personal exhibition
"Sodom and Gomorrah, a reportage from the lost cities",
put on in the huge and magnificent Guinness Storehouse of Dublin, in Ireland.
The exhibition, entirely sponsored by Guinness who have a history of supporting the arts,
consists of 12 pictures printed in large format, with a middle size of cms. 200x250.
The show can be seen from 24 August to 5 October, in the higher floors of the building,
reserved for the shows and the artistic events, extremely attractive about the way the architecture
of the beginning of the century fuses with graceful lightness to the steel and the plexiglass.

Guinness Storehouse
Guinness Storehouse is a remarkable new development based in St James's Gate Brewery,
Dublin, the home of Guinness. Recently completed, following a ?30 million investment,
Guinness Storehouse is forecast to be Ireland's most popular visitor attraction,
providing facilities for up to one million Irish and overseas visitors annually.
This unique Guinness experience has been developed in a 1904 listed building
and encompasses 170,000 sq.ft. or nearly four acres of floor space
over six floors built around a huge pint glass atrium.
On top is located Gravity, the bar in the sky with the highest view of Dublin City
which offers unrivalled views of the cityscape.
This extraordinary building houses a world class visitor experience, retail store, gallery and exhibition spaces;
events, venues; restaurant and bar areas, the company archive and state-of-the-art training and conference facilities.
Completed in 1904, the Storehouse building was the first steel framed building in Ireland.
It is based on the Chicago style of architecture and was formerly a fully operational plant
or fermenting and storing Guinness until the 1980s.

5th
is the name given to the arts programme at Guinness Storehouse.
5th supports diverse creative process through development and exhibition of Irish and International arts practice.
As part of this programme, 5th gallery opens it’s doors for the first time on the December 6th, starting at zero
with Peter Robinson and heading towards a very exciting and eclectic program for next year.
Due to the sheer physical size and the many sensory activities within Storehouse, 5th gallery (the right to remain silent)
exists as an oasis to involve the senses with the work on exhibit.
The unique location of 5th exposes contemporary art practice to a readymade audience of over 600,000
a year and rising. The doors are open every day to visitors, artists and individuals with an interest in the arts.
Admission is free

Artistic Director: Paul Murnaghan
Paul Murnaghan is an artist / curator and Artistic Director of the 5th (www.5th.ie) Gallery in Dublin, his work primarily deals with the examination of human emotion realised through digital means. Murnaghan is a cross - discipline artist who has exhibited his soundworks throughout Europe and America. During the last 3 years Paul has curated work for artists such as Chris Cunningham, Grace Weir and Alessandro Bavari. Previously he was working as Artistic Co-ordinator for Arthouse in Dublin (The Center for Multimedia Arts in Ireland). He has an eclectic creative past ranging from fronting diverse musical incarnation 'Damn you Peter Pan' on MTV in the early 90's to designing for several fashion labels, most recently he has concentrated on exhibiting installations in a number of group and solo gallery shows. He lives and works in Dublin, Ireland.

Guinness Storehouse,
St James's Gate Dublin 8
IRELAND
Tel: +353 (0) 1 408 4800
Fax: +353 (0) 1 408 4965

 

 

The Irish Examiner - Friday 17.08.2001
A voyeur's view of hangings
Sodom and Gomorrah, a Reportage from the Lost Cities, an exhibition of twelve dramatic largescale images by modern classical painter Alessandro Bavari, will be displayed at the Guinness Storehouse from August 24 to October 5. A team of abseilers was required to hang these striking works from the roof of the central atrium and, according to those who have been setting up the show, viewing them evokes a feeling somewhere between voyeurism and doing the Stations of the Cross. Should be an interesting sensation.

 

The Irish Independent - Wednesday 22 august 2001
There's no ceiling too high in the name of modern art
Hanging a painting has never proved as challenging as when a group of abseilers dropped from the central atrium of the Guinness Storehouse yesterday evening, all in the name of art. The group dropped from the central atrium and dangled 100 feet in the air, at the fifth floor of the building, strugging with 12 dramatic, largescale images that will hang in the Storehouse for the next six weeks. Sodom and Gomorrah - a Reportage from the Lost Cities is an exhibition by Alessandro Bavari, incorporating huge prints, which average around 2x3 metres in size, from the lost biblical cities.
A spokesman for the Guinness Storehouse said they were very excited about the exhibition after several months of planning by the group. "We want exhibitions that use the whole building as a backdrop for the paintings," said Paul Murnaghan, artistic director at the Storehouse. Art exhibitions are not a new venture for the venue, which has held several to date, and where a cutting edge gallery - planned to open by Christmas - is under construction. "Our policy is to find good work no matter where it sits on the artistic scale," added Mr Murnaghan. Bavari is a modern classical painter and combines photography and painting with 2-d and 3-d computer generated images.
The exhibition by the Italian artist will run from Friday, August 24 to Friday, October 5.

Caroline Crawford

 

The Irish Times - Wednesday 22 august 2001
SODOM AND GOMORRAH
Fifth floor of The Guinness Storehouse, St James's Gate, Dublin
First we had Gottfried Helnwein's monumental photorealist images causing a bit of a stir in Kilkenny, and now Alessandro Bavari goes all monumental with a series of twelve huge paintings on the fifth floor of The Storehouse at St James's Gate. Sodom and Gomorrah: A Reportage from the Lost Cities is Italian artist Bavari's quirky visualisation of a tour through the fabled Biblical cities, memorably destroyed by the almighty for their inhabitants' lack uf moral fibre. Bavari is very taken with that lack of moral fibre, and he envisages his series of digital paintings (combining classical and hi-tech methods) as "an enormous freak show", chronicling an imagined tour of places "devoted to vice and lust". Since, as he notes, "no one knows anything about Sodom and Gomorrah", he takes his lead from writer Italo Calvino, specifically Invisible Cities, in which Calvino has Marco Polo describing places he has visited to Kublai Khan. Bavari collected material for his paintings any and everywhere, photographing anything that caught his eye on journeys near and far, and he sees the paintings as an on going project. Why 12? Because he has the idea that viewing the work is a cross between voyeurism and a sacred experience.

Aidan Dunne

 

The Sunday Business Post - August 26, 2001
Sodom and Gomorrah
by Alessandro Bavari
Monochrome posters around Dublin of a strange figure with dark eyes, wings and eight nipples should finally start to make a bit of sense. These images on billboards and beer mats are part of a teaser campaign for an exhibition at the Guinness Storehouse. The strange creature is one of a series of figures that feature in the exhibition Sodom and Gomorrah - A Reportage from the Lost Cities, a collection of work by Italian artist Alessandro Bavari. The question of whether the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah actually existed is not a new one. One theory is that an earthquake or other natural disaster destroyed them and that they are now submerged beneath the Dead Sea. Another is that they were fictional places created for the Book of Genesis to symbolise places of no morality, where sexual perversion and vice were rife. Rather than attempting to prove or disprove these theories, Bavari has created a body of work described as an imaginary journey through the two damned cities. The 12 large pieces, about 2 metres by 2 metres, feature images of people and places created through a combination of two dimensional and three dimensional computer-generated images, painting and photography. Walking past the 12 images is supposed to be representative of doing the Stations of the Cross.
This is the first official non-Guinness exhibition to be shown in the Storehouse.
A permanent gallery is due to be opened in the building in November; it will be called The 5th.
Until then, Sodom and Gomorrah can be seen on the 5th floor of the elaborate Storehouse.

 

The Sunday Times
Culture - Art
Alessandro Bavari: Sodom and Gomorrah
Bavari's images seem to be part of the current revival of the gothic aesthetic so prevalent in both music and cinema, but are far more subtle and multi-faceted than they first appear. These richly textured, computer generated images?such as Nymphomaniacs in the Depths of Gomorrah, above ? suggest influences as diverse as the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, the cinema of Fritz Lang and the writings of Italo Calvino. Bavari's cities, while clearly amoral, offer endless possibilites for freedom, sexual exploration and inventiveness. He also plays with the notion of voyeurism by having many of his protagonists gaze intently at the viewer. The imaginative hanging of these absorbing, striking images in a circular glass atrium perfectly complements their uniqueness.

Catherine Daly

 

The Sunday Tribune - 2 september 2001 Visual Art
Dark Ages
The exhibition at the Guinness Storehouse may evoke feelings of voyeurism,
because of its connections
It is worth going to the Guinness Storehouse if simply for the view. Where the Guinness Hopstore appeared warm and dark, the Storehouse gives the impression of being all glass and light and airy - particularly if you go via the lift to the bar on the top floor which is glass almost all the way round and affords the most spectacular panorama of the city (Probably not to be recommended for people with vertigo). It is particularly dramatic at night. In the middle of the fifth floor of the Storehouse is 'Sodom and Gomorrah - a reportage from the lost cities', an exhibition of 12 works by Italian artist Alessandro Bavari. Bavari is a modern classical painter who combines photography and painting with computer generated images. He has exhibited extensively in Italy and Mexico, Russia, London, and France, as well as numerous web exhibitions. This is his first Irish show. Hanging from the centre of the storehouse are large black and white works which are a bit lost amidst the paraphernalia of the original structure of the storehouse and the hustle and bustle of the cafe. These works might have greater impact in a more ordinary venue. As it is, on the sunny morning I was there, it was difficult to actually see them properly through the glass and with the sun overhead. The publicity blurb described the exhibition as "an imaginary journey through two damned cities, Sodom and Gomorrah where people live happily in a total absence of morality, where sexual perversion is part of everyday life and considered a virtue...." It didn't appear quite that extreme but more a cross between sci-fi movies and the medieval paintings of Bosch, with a good dollop of surrealism thrown in. Hieronymous Bosch who flourished at the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th was an early Dutch painter who created bizarre visions around the themes of judgement day, the infernos of hell etc, involving complex imagery The picture surfaces were generally crammed, with great attention paid to detail. A practicing Catholic rather than a heretic - as was thought for many years - his fantasies gave full rein to his imaginative view of the torments of hell. And yet there was an everyday element about them; he centred his works on then contemporary Netherlands, and focused on ordinary Dutch people caught up in this whirlwind of God's wrath - which presumably made it far more terrifying for its audience. There is a strong feeling of Bosch in Bavari's work. It is concerned with a similar theme, man's sins and indulgences and the ensuing threat. Yet Bosch believed in his theme and created the work as a warning to the masses to mend their ways, whereas Bavari's seems more to be exploring the mythical Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, experimenting with the possibilities of that society, their enjoyment of their "sins" and the realisation of the prophesy In Bavari's work there is a dramatic, over-the-top, rather camp, theatrical feel, purposely created with a certain amount of shock value, whereas the Dutch painter's work appears to be one of profound religious belief - although it too was created to shock its audience but in a completely different way. Bavari's small scale naked people appear quite innocent, unknowing, while rather horrific creatures, bloodied veined figures, or strangely neutral-sexed winged bodies, presumably created as a result of their actions or those of their antecedents, tower over them or appear in larger-than-life scale in following works. Bavari's works too seem to share with Bosch a delight in allegory and symbolism, and also to have that strange disjointedness of dreams that appears in Bosch's nightmarish works and which is also exploited to the full in surrealist work of the 20th century. There is an atmosphere too in 'Sodom and Gomorrah' of Gothic horror movies with beheaded dogs, distorted human bodies and the inclusion of birds and animals which appear to be voyeurs. In some works there is also an illustrative element as if depicting episodes from a supremely dark fairytale. (The publicity blurb suggests that walking the full circle of numbered images "evokes a feeling somewhere between voyeurism and doing the Stations of the Cross", presumably because of the biblical connection. What ever the case, that certainly didn't ring true for this viewer.)
This show is on at the Storehouse, St James's Gate until 5 October.

 

Transcript of extract from:
Programme: art beat
Subject: Sodom & Gomorrah exhibition
Station: Anna Livia
Date & Time: 29.08.2001 - 7,30 PM
Duration: 12 minutes, 55 sec

PRESENTER: Paul Murnaghan, Good Evening Paul, thank you for coming.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: No problem.

PRESENTER: ... is going to talk to me about an exhibition at the Storehouse, called 'Sodom and Gomorrah - a Reportage of the Lost Cities', exhibition by Italian artist, Alessandro Bavari, and that's until the 5th Of October, so I'll discuss this exhibition with Paul in a minute.

** music break

PRESENTER: 'Sodom and Gomorrah - a Reportage of the Lost Cities', what a great name of the current exhibition, at the Storehouse. It's a show of twelve large paintings from the cities of ... the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here, in studio with me, Paul Murnaghan, creator of the exhibition. 'Paul, the artist, the Italian artist, Alessandro Bavari, issued a statement with his exhibition, and he said that, 'no one knows anything about Sodom and Gomorrah', do you know anything about it, Paul'.

PAUL MURNAGHAN - STOREHOUSE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: I know what his vision of 'Sodom and Gomorrah' is.

PRESENTER: Okay, and how did he

PAUL MURNAGHAN: It's a, well he sees it as a land free of morals, moral restrictions. So basically he depicts these people living in different scenarios. Where he makes you like a voyeur upon their work. Lots of times when you look at it, you find, either they are looking at some initiation rite or something and you see it in their faces, or you are observing somebody observing something, like 'Portrait of a Girl who looks in the Mirror', you've probably seen that image around town.

PRESENTER: Yes, it's around town, in a postcard, yeah.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: It's a narcissistic voyeuristic picture, where she's looking at herself in the mirror and she's mutated into this form, which she believes is a beautiful form. In all the mutations, within the work are meant to be better forms of the human being, so that they can actually perform better sexually and fetishly within this world.

PRESENTER: Oh, is this what it was, 'cos I thought, what was behind the story was the inbreeding that. . .

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Well, the inbreeding is what creates these beautiful creatures. PRESENTER: And apparently, according to the legend, it was a sort of pride to come up with different bodies, is it.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Well no, I think that was kind of added by Alessandro. The legend is, obviously it was destroyed by the wrath of God because it was so evil. And he's just saying that it wasn't destroyed and this is how he would depict it, having developed.

PRESENTER: And did he think those cities existed, did he base his work upon ...

PAUL MURNAGHAN: I think he just took those two cities because they were like a blank canvas and he could develop them very well, without anybody being able to say, this is this way or that is that way. It gave him the freedom to give them the freedom.

PRESENTER: Okay, where are they believed to be based, those cities, to be located, sorry?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: In the Bible, as far as I know.

PRESENTER: Because there's something with Pompeii or something, and I think there's been some scholar, researcher ...

PAUL MURNAGHAN: There was a documentary a while ago, about how these, could these cities have existed, and could they have been destroyed around this time. And they did scientific experimentation into the land around that area, the actual, how it's constructed, the layer of mud, and the layer underneath it. It's beside a great, it's beside the sea basically. And they did a couple of tests basically of what the land was like at that time, and there is il volcanic activity around that area, at that time as well. And they surmised that it could actually, they could have slid into the sea and been destroyed, because of the way the earth if compacted around that area.

PRESENTER: Okay, all we have from it anyway today is Alessandro Bavari's picture. What do they look like Paul, 'cos I've seen them, but if you could give an idea to the listeners of my not seeing the show. They're very, I thought they were something between, they're very cinematographical, they're something between Louis Bunel and Tim Burton, what do you think, how would you describe them?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: I'd say, Tim Burton, I think, well there's a certain amount of humour in that alright. I think he might be a little bit more serious. I see pieces, a lot of Yeronimous Bosch and even the construction of, a little from Caravaggio, Giotto, because he comes from the school of Roman painters, he was trained as a classical painter first, but obviously these are not paintings. What they start off as is photographs, where, if you've seen the image, 'Girl who looks at herself' ... 'Portrait of a Girl who looks at herself in the Mirror', that is actually, I met this girl. She actually freaked me out as well, because of her face.

PRESENTER: Oh, it's based on an actual girl.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: These are all real people. Yeah, she was at the opening on Friday. Her name is Laura. She's from his village which is about seventy miles outside Rome. The people ...

PRESENTER: And does she look anything like the picture?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: They are her eyes and her breasts, the nose and mouth are different. By the eyes you can recognise her immediately.

PRESENTER: Okay. I was too busy drinking.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: The portrait of 'Nymphomaniacs in the depths of Gomorrah', are actually five gay men, who posed for him during the Gay Rights, during the Pride March in Rome.

PRESENTER: Nymphomaniac gay men?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Well they're not, they posed for the shot, and he brings them into the realm of his own world. He uses real people, and like, a lot of the construction is, maybe, there's a cathedral, a broken down cathedral, from Prague. There's an old factory that's broken down in his village. There are people from different walks of life, a lot of his friends, a lot of objects. He constantly photographs textures and scenarios and then he brings them in, which actually adds a strong taste of realism to the work. Even though the work is very imaginary, it looks realistic, because the way the bodies pose and fall, the looks on their faces, you know, they are taken from real life but reconstructed within a digital programme.

PRESENTER: With a surreal feel to it.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: True. There's even elements, I suppose of, a touch of Dali in the odd one.

PRESENTER: Yes, very much so. I'll go back to his techniques in a minute but you've met the man himself. What was he like, he sounds like a mad thing?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: He's not at all actually, he's very quiet. I first saw an image on a CD and I liked it and checked it out on web, and then I emailed him. And then eventually, when I could find the right location to put on his exhibition, I went to his studio in Italy. And there was about eighteen photographs on the ground, and we had he doesn't speak any English, so we had an interpreter, and that girl, standing in the corner, who was very weird, but very nice, but was freaking me out at the time.

PRESENTER: Oh, she's a friend of his. Oh, because this was going to be my next question. 'How did you come across this artist?' So, you saw the ...

PAUL MURNAGHAN: So, we went there, and the images were quite, they were maybe, I don't know, eighteen inches by twelve inches or something, at that time, and we went for the eighteen images. And I put forward to him, the idea of hanging them in, a hundred foot up, and in this circle, and with the number of twelve being a biblical number, and creating that scenario curatorally out of the work. And he was, he was well up for it, so...

PRESENTER: Did you go, did you go out all the way to Italy, to meet him and suggest ...

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Yeah. PRESENTER: Oh very good. And, so this is the world premier basically. It hasn't been shown, this exhibition hasn't been shown anywhere else.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: No, not at all.

PRESENTER: 'Cos, 'cos he's exhibited extensively in France, Russia, South America and everything, but it's his first time in Ireland.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: But in a very, very different format.

PRESENTER: Okay, I was going to ask you also, is this typical of his work, or what does he usually . . .

PAUL MURNAGHAN: No, normally his work would probably be shown like most photographic or digital work a would be shown. It wouldn't have had this curatorial aspect on it. What we're trying to do at the Fifth, which is the gallery you were at on Friday, is to take things onto a different a realm really, to approach them without the normal, I don't know, the little laws that have been laid down for displaying work, which I would, it's not that I would not agree with, I am happy to be ignorant of, and I'm I wanted to, like use my percentage of, my philistine percentage, to show work, you know. To try and show it in completely different ]' ways and ignore what would normally be laid down for it. Like, this is lit, during the day by daylight basically, through the top of the large atrium, twenty-four spotlights underneath spread, with certain types of filters on them, to make it work within the monochromatic elements that are in the work.

PRESENTER: Well, for coming up with such an unusual exhibition, the Storehouse is probably an ideal surrounding, yeah.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Oh, very much so.

PRESENTER: it's, but it's a sort of a glass pillar.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Yes. There's a glass atrium that goes up through the first five floors, and then it splits off to the top, where there's a glass three hundred and sixty degree, bar, basically, but my remit is to use the whole building as a blank canvas. So, the next exhibition actually, that's going after this as well, is I'll be using that glass bar in the sky as an indigenous light box and projecting video works onto the side of it, at night, so you can see them as you walk through the city.

PRESENTER: Okay. I'm interested. And is the entry free to this gallery?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Yes.

PRESENTER: Okay, 'cos I thought you have to pay in to

PAUL MURNAGHAN: You have to pay in if you want to go through that visitor experience, the Guinness Experience.

PRESENTER: Okay. So the artwork is on show for free. How long has it been opened, it's fairly new isn't it?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Since Christmas.

PRESENTER: Okay. And that's all part of the Thomas Street area revamping?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Yeah.

PRESENTER: Yeah. It surely looks very nice. I just want to go back to Alessandro Bavari's work, before I let you go. He used many different techniques. Is there any paintings in it at all?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: There is. Like he, when he does a photograph, he could blow up the photograph and then he may paint upon that. He would also use a process of chemical etching to create different textures within the photograph, and then he would scan that in, bring it into the digital programme, and then layer on top of that again. And then he might, you could have any number of photographs on different layers, like layers of tracing paper on top of each other. Until you come to a finished scenario.

PRESENTER: Okay. And they're all black and white pictures?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Well they're actually four colour. But they do look black and white to an extent, but to print them, to get the effect that he has, you actually use four colours. There's a certain amount of ... there's tiny greens and browns within that black and white as well.

PRESENTER: Okay. The whole result, the whole, the way it's created and everything, you feel somewhere lost between a nightware and a dream, between a fairytale and a horror movie.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: This is true.

PRESENTER: Is that what you intended to do?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Well, his intention, the work is obviously all from him, but I don't think it was, I think he just wanted to create an alternative reality. And he believes that this in a beautiful form, and that to live without morals is a beautiful thing. And that's what he was trying to show.

PRESENTER: Okay. That was his statement. Paul, you've come recently to the Storehouse. Can I ask you, before I let you go, what your background is?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Well, very quickly I suppose, I'm an artist, I work still as an artist. I was three years in Art House, developing artistic concepts, using multimedia, running the artistic programme. Before that, I was seven years fronting a band actually, and touring around the world, and at the same time painting, and before that I was a fashion designer.

PRESENTER: Okay.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: A lot of parallel stuff.

PRESENTER: And you ended up in the new media?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Kind of. I don't consider it really new media, yes this is digital art to an extent. But it's like, it's like when Les Paul invented the electric guitar, people were kind of going, 'okay, this is, that's not real, that's not going to play real music, it's not an acoustic guitar, it's an electric guitar'. He's just got the electric paintbrush, as far as I can see. That's what the digital format does for him.

PRESENTER: Okay. But you didn't let me finish my sentence.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Sorry.

PRESENTER: I was going to say, the new media area of Dublin.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Ah right, sorry, excuse me.

PRESENTER: No, that's okay, that was interesting. But I believe Thomas Street, the area of Thomas Street is said to become, what is happening there?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: It's like, they're making a digital hub, that's what they've been saying for a long time. They have, MIT has moved in there, obviously as well. And they develop a lot of scientific and artistic concepts using multimedia. The whole area there is going to be built up, I think, to produce software and many things. And it'll be a link between, hopefully Art House and Project and all the different galleries, and the different scientific and learning areas as well, and colleges, you've got the NCAD as well, obviously. To do work, to actually, a lot of the artists are going to MIT, to see if they can work there, some of them are coming to Storehouse, to put on exhibitions there. I would like to work back towards Art House, Project, and create a digitally creative community, within that area. So that's the hope for the next few years, anyway.

PRESENTER: And are you optimistic about the whole project?

PAUL MURNAGHAN: I actually am very optimistic.

PRESENTER: Yeah, it sounds ... well going by the proposals and everything it sounds very interesting, and bring a bit of dynamism to that area, which is a very good ...

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Very true.

PRESENTER: Okay, well Paul, thank you very much for coming.

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Thank you.

PRESENTER: Paul...

PAUL MURNAGHAN: Murnaghan.

** laugh together

PRESENTER: Murnaghan. Artistic Director of the Storehouse. Thank you for coming.

 

 

RTE INTERACTIVE, ACE

Alessandro Bavari
'Sodom and Gomorrah, a reportage from the lost cities'
Guinness Storehouse, St James' Gate, Dublin
24 August to 5 October 2001.

Alessandro Bavari's work is at once strange and familiar.
On show at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, these fantastical images reveal an imagined world where perversity ? or perhaps simply diversity ? is celebrated, and anything is possible. Butterfly wings sprout from the shoulders of a woman with many nipples as she admires herself in a mirror.
Twisted torsos wave their arms like basketball players as they glide around a pillared ballroom; their skirts become cages as you notice the small people trapped beneath them.
The calmly seated and crossed legs of a severed body act as a base for a coiffed bonsai; small people climb, their curious heads emerging from the leafy treetop. In Sodom people peer from circular windows in mounds on the ground, in Gomorrah they wave from round pits; both cities feature fantastical topiary and crazy fairground-like skyscraper structures.
All twelve images have a gothic yet modern feel, an almost painterly texture and engrossing detail.
Italian artist Alessandro Bavari uses Adobe Photoshop, a computer programme, to create these worlds and their inhabitants.
Much of the source material comes from photographs he has taken around the world; the people are people Bavari knows ? at least elements of them.
'Portrait of Nymphomaniacs in the depths of Gomorrah' takes a photograph of participants in a Gay Pride march as its starting point. The eyes of '?a Girl Who Looks at Herself in the Mirror' are the eyes of Bavari's girlfriend. The environments mix the architecture of European museums and other real buildings with the rubble from a ruined factory in the artist's hometown. Perhaps it is this that makes the viewer feel at home.
Often with photomontage the eye is drawn to the joins, constantly seeking out the point where one image meets another, looking for the edges within the whole. Not so here, the illusion is so complete it is almost possible to believe these are photographs of real people and places.
By treating the computer as simply another tool Bavari has overcome that barrier that sometimes allows technology to intrude on artistic vision. He refers to Photoshop as being just like a brush, palette or darkroom ? he knows that each tool has its uses and no one tool can replace them all.
These images marry the processes of digital manipulation, painting, chemical etching and photography. Bavari began painting and engraving and then started to use materials like tar, glue, fossils and bones in his work before discovering computers in 1993.
Working with an awareness of an ongoing tradition, Bavari makes reference to Italian and Flemish artists like Giotto, Michaelangelo, Hieronymus Bosch, Jan Van Eyk. His education in scene-painting and art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome has left its mark.
Taking Italo Calvino's 'Le Citta Invisibili' (1972) as inspiration, Bavari's description of how he sees Sodom and Gomorrah offers a key to approaching his work: "I have imagined these two cities as a kind of amusement park for visionaries, where my gaze is neither accusing nor benevolent, but simply amused and curious, open to taking in as much as possible."
If at first glance these images seem too polished and somehow commercial, a second and third glance will reveal something deeper: a haunting and very beautiful vision that also offers subtle comment on how we live today.
Bavari's work is available for viewing online at alessandrobavari.com but somehow a small computer screen does not do these images justice.
Far better to gaze as they dangle five stories up among the steel girders and Escher-esque elevators of the spectacular Storehouse structure.

Crist? Leach

 

STUNNED
www.stunned.org/storehouse/
SODOM AND GOMORRAH a reportage from the lost cities

Alessandro Bavari's exhibition of twelve digital works is currently at the Storehouse, St James's Gate, Dublin. Bavari is one of a new breed of painters that blend the classical and the digital, he has exhibited his work all over the world but never before in Ireland.The images marry a process of digital manipulation, painting, chemical etching and photography. Bavari, a classically trained Italian painter has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, he came to this work in the early 1990's with a strong grounding in the techniques of oils, watercolours and engraving. Bavari's influences hint at Giotto, Michelangelo and Hieronymus Bosch. Both Italian and Flemish schools of art are part of the inspiration for these incredibly detailed images.

The exhibition Sodom and Gomorrah, is a work in progress, one Bavari feels will never end. For this work in Dublin he has chosen a biblical number of twelve images. These large-scale pieces (2m x 2m approx) will be hung in a numbered circular flow inside of the glass atrium. It is best to approach Sodom and Gomorrah in a manner not unlike 'doing' the Stations of the Cross, when you enter the room follow the pieces until you reach the end of the numbered sequence. The twelve giant images will be hung in the Atrium of the 5th floor at Storehouse, the project will require a team of ab-sailors to hang the work, an event in itself.

The theme of the exhibition is based on the biblical story. Bavari takes us on a visual journey of two damned cities where people happily live in a total absence of morality, devoted to vice and lust, where every kind of sexual perversion is part of normal life. This direction is not taken for its shock value, on the contrary it is handled with subtle ingenuity, letting the eye inform the mind and the mind grapple with a unique yet strangely familiar hybrid of voyeurism.

"All cities were invented; I keep a file on object, a file on animals, one on individuals, one on historical figures and another on mythological heroes. I have a file on the four seasons and one on the five senses; in one I collect pages related to the cities and landscapes of my life and in another imaginary cities, outside of space and time." Italo Calvino (The Invisible Cities, 1972, Einaudi )

 

 

 

Hot Irish Art - By Mic Moroney, Art Critic, 2001
SODOM & GOMORRAH - A Reportage From the Lost Cities
Alessandro Bavari @ The Guinness Storehouse, Dublin


The ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, two of five Biblical cities on the Siddim plain destroyed by a huge conflagration around 1900 B.C, are now believed to have been located, south-east of the Dead Sea. The ruins were turned to ash; covered with balls of pure, pressed, powdered sulphur; and covered by three feet of debris. Geologists have speculated that an earthquake may have exploded petroleum-based bitumen deposits out of the earth through a nearby fault line, which then ignited. Meanwhile, Lot's wife, supposedly turned into a pillar of salt, may relate to the outlandish salt floes which crystallise by the Dead Sea. It's as good a collection of theories as you can get.

However, contrary to Christianised homophobia, out of 39 mentions of Sodom in the Old Testament, none relates explicitly to homosexuality, or indeed debauch on any major scale. Rather, God asserts in Ezekiel 16:49-50 that Sodom "and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before Me. Therefore I did away with them".

However, Italian artist Alessandro Bavari, follows the Marquis de Sade and many others into an imaginary decadent past with a series of fetishistic images which hint at all manner of polysexual perversity. They're quite luscious, crepuscular, monochrome pictures with a stylish, fantastical pop sensibilty, and a visual vocabulary which owes a great deal to Hieronymous Bosch (c.1450-1516), and Surrealists such as Ernst.

The depth and allure of the imagery is very evolved, almost reminiscent of the assiduous fantasticality of Ridley Scott's movie, Legend. It conjures up a parallel universe of mythological glamour, revisited as though from the dawn of photography. The images are quite painterly, worked up from pictures of made or found objects like bones, plants and fossils, or posing models. Bavari then etches over the photographic prints, which are then scanned into image-manipulation programmes such as PhotoShop and SoftImage.

The prints mounted in the Guinness Store are big digital prints, printed on semi-matt photographic paper which is developed in traditional chemical baths, so that you get this smooth unpixellated texture. Paul Murnaghan, the new artistic director of the Guinness Storehouse, has hung the 12 images inside the glass-panelled atrium, dangling high in the 5th floor gallery - not an entirely ideal way of displaying them in the busy space, but a spectacular one, nonetheless. Murnaghan reckons that walking around the 12 images in a circle is "somewhere between voyeurism and doing the Stations of the Cross".

The Gate
Like the luscious bottom-end of the Venus de Milo having a sit-down, this sawn-off figure rests amidst classical drapery and stalactites of irrepressible ivy, while in the mists of the screen in front of her, a pair of headless, robust nudes luxuriantly wade, hand in hand, up to their bottoms in water. Scaling the topiarised bonsai tree which rises fantastically from her midriff, a whole little crew of Boschian midgets - naked as Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden - scale to the top of the swooping shrubbery, as though to commune with the heavens. Even more of them huddle under our Venus' seat, looking upwards - what, protesting at her modestly crossed legs? Perhaps another piece among our 12 stations, The Hall of Coprophilia, may suggest other possibilities?.

Sodom City
The topiarised landscape of trees shorn like poodles, or into the shapes of lyres, only vaguely resolves in the eye, like some futuristic city dreamt up in the distant past. It almost evades you the more you look into it - the little nesting mounds from which the naked Boschian Sodomites emerge and peek out from their little molehills; the masses of the city seen as underworld creatures who occasionally scale the trees after forbidden fruit. The generalised forest scene recedes into what looks like a giant, ghostly echinoderm on the left, while the architectural gyres and helixes of a city have a idealised science-fiction hue, with some strange little flying pods, resembling sea-shells, hovering in the twilit sky.

Gomorrah City
Here they are again, our little Boschian figurines, naked as the day they were born, and peeking out from their mortal, pathetic holes in the ground. They're little anonymous figures, often seen in groups, one or two pointing upwards, or holding their fists aloft in some bid for divine attention. Again a fantastic garden of weird topiary dominates their landscape, dotted with similarly fantastical architectures to Sodom's, borrowed from botanical tendrils and floral wonders. Again, nesting in a conglomeration of foliage from a number of trees, there are little nests of people, aching upwards toward a heaven beyond their grasp. Indeed, it's a Heaven that will soon shower their skin with brimstone?

Three Voyeurs
This rather daft, playful photograph of the Gomorrah cityscape features a trio of fine figures of young urban manhood, gawping down into the mysterious underworld of the naked little imps of the Gomorrans, in a stance somewhere between doing press-ups and gearing up to sprint 100 metres. What mysterious rituals could be Bavari's "voyeurs" be watching? What orgies of Little People? What squeaky little mobs of naked midgets might be shouting back up at them??

Lot's Progeny - a Girl on Pillory
The title is probably a rather awkward translation of Lot's daughter. If you remember in the Biblical account, Lot was the only decent, God-fearing man in Sodom, and his daughter being of similar bent, seems to appear here as a kind of mutant, punk angel; wearing the fashion-fetishistical, penitential, pitted metal cube, perhaps to atone for the sins of her debauched compatriots. But of course, it's a sexy image in its own right, the cuddlesome butt squatting on her chubby ankles, the tasteful distressing of the photographic surface sinking into a kind of late-mediaeval blur. And how sweet she is, with her two little-angel-wings, and the ornamental songbirds which emerge cheeping from her head?

Bera, King of Sodom
This bizarre re-imagining of the Biblical Sodomite king rather hops around one's retina, with his repeating, multiple arms between his militant twin sceptres, and an elongated chestful of breasts more populated than a sow's in farrow. It's like the arms of Siva, crossed with that great grape-bunch of breasts from the famous statue of the Roman goddess, Diana (formerly the Greek deity, Artemis) from the Temple of Ephesus, now in the Museum in Naples. But for all his apparent fecundity, Bera is a bristling pallisade of menacing spears under his mediaeval helmet and chain mail; coolly exploding upwards from his barred throne, metamorphosing into hermaphroditic, erogenous power.

Portrait of Two Lovers in Gomorrah
This family photo mischievously suggests the amorous pursuits of the Gomorrans. An odd dominatrix towers over her charge, as they pose among a haze of classical ruins. She, with her six fingers on each hand, looks like a big lady, while her mask resembles a bit of DIY SM fashion, like a rubber glove pulled over her head; its fingers transforming into the stinging, beaded fronds of a sea anemone. She bears a tattoo of a (male-eating?) spider on her chest, whilst two little lizards are pinioned by tourniquets on her biceps. Homer Gomorrah, meanwhile, stares almost mournfully, comically out of the eyeholes of his hood, like a KKK man photographed at home with his trousers down; or like those hooded Native American ritual masks, with their unnerving similarity to mediaeval Inquisitional torture methods. Mind you, in the interests of taste, the male genitalia have been scratched out of the picture, as these outlandish creatures ghoul out at you from a peculiarly domestic pose.

Portrait of a Girl Who Looks at Herself in a Mirror
Alice in Wonderland has nothing on this grotesquely quaint peek into the self-conscious world of a Gomorran girl and her self-image. It's an over-the-shoulder view of her, fanning her little arms which have mutated into leaves, or gauzy insect-wings. Her eyes and lips are accentuatedly coloured and vividly distorted as she dreams into herself, admiring her frog-necklace as it sets off her milky-white neck and rounded breasts, beaded with impossible little nipples. The voyeurism factor is ramped up, as a similarly distorted boy-face stares from the background at this tender moment of self-exposure; while yet another naked figure in a mediaeval battle-mask seems to move in with a pair of fire-tongs. A strange imagining this, from somewhere on the cusp of sexual exploration, as another little face appears behind her in another mirror, suggesting an infinite regression of reflected images.

The Hall of Coprophilia
There is the air of a haunted ballroom here in this composite image of ruined villas and derelict factory buildings, in which a series of giant anatomical models of the male torso are frozen in balletic poses throughout this imaginary space. Each is poised atop what seems like a conicular wooden frame - stylised dresses in which are trapped, it seems, little gangs of our naked Little People of Sodom and Gomorrah, as though inside some sacrifical wicker man, destined to be fed to the flame. Bavari had his own ideas of what's going on, if you return to the title of the work?

A Woman Observing an Initiation Rite
This is a difficult image to read, with its view of a window - whether from inside or out, it is difficult to discern. The central character is a young woman, her forearms sheathed in ornamental finery, her face like a Polynesian mask of stylised horror as she gazes in at - what? We are given little clue, other than the gaggle of sacred swans and flamingos to the right, and the decapitated, stuffed dog to the left - who could hardly be the author of the turd below the window? A thin bread knife lies on the ground beside it, while to add to this irresolvable drama, the shadow of a male figure approaches her - whether in menace or concern, it is impossible to say...

Nymphomaniacs in the Depths of Gomorrah
It should not at all spoil the fun of this picture to know that the centrepiece is three queens snapped at a gay pride event, here altered to suggest a trio of heavy-set, leopard-skin bunny-girls, flirting away in great campery. The party sure looks like fun, a froth of sensuality and desire emanating not only from the foreground, but also the face-masked form behind them, and the cast of characters in the background: Hermes-headed naked men, others with outlandish faces like bloated tropical fish, one billowing around like some alien Chinese dragon. A disgruntled or envious-looking baboon head, meanwhile, stares from a porthole window, as though peeking in on someone else's party?

Birsa, King of Gomorrah, Sees his Destiny
Birsa, here scantily robed as a fairy tale king, with a belly big enough to suggest pregnancy, tiptoes gently onto the stage where his destiny has appeared to him in a great flare of ribbons which seem almost to scribble in the air, and little fizzing planets. This three-armed goddess hovers over a typically, Gomorran black hole in the ground. More impossible topiary springs up from other little holes, as the monarch sensually circles this vision of upbeat apocalypse.

? HotIrishArt / Mic Moroney 2001