Net Jumps

1921 – 2021
The birth of the parallel, extra-material world of the
HYPER-MIND
that lives in our present

OPENING
Thursday May 27^th 2021, from 2 pm to 8 pm
From May 28^th to July 30^th 2021

The Galleria Allegra Ravizza is pleased to present NET JUMPS, a group show of the artists Igor Eškinja, Franklin Evans, and Federico Luger.
The show aims at sparking off thoughts, through the work of three artists and a historical research lasting over one hundred years, on the birth of the contemporary HYPER-MIND; a chronological show of the earliest intuitions of readings of science fiction from the 1920s, a historical analyses and links with the Cold War in the 1950s, to the birth of the first role-playing video games and the consequent invention of avatars.

The starting point is the dystopian Future of Ruggero Vasari’s “Anxiety of machines”, a literary drama begun exactly one hundred years ago, in distant 1921. The story told by the show begins here, from that Vasari-like future that generated the hyper-mind, that today inhabits our perceptive universe.
We can define the Hyper-mind as that ability developed by human beings to understand and act by projecting on themselves an abstraction never reached before.

With the arrival of computer-machines and their mass linking up, together with an extremely rapid development of the mathematical and informatics sciences, the ideas that came from ancient humanity have become real extra-material ideas, present and active in our real and perceptive world.
In the world of Plato’s Ideas there was no joystick! In ours yes.
NET JUMPS is a jump among the new worlds and new estrangements. In the rooms of the gallery you can play with new and old video games, a path between historical computers and informatics and telematics, and you can analyse the three aspects on which is based the formation of our Hyper-mind.

Perceived space | Igor Eškinja
The levels of information | Franklin Evans
Extra-material interaction | Federico Luger

The Croatian photographer Igor Eškinja (Rijeka, Croazia 1975), with the use of the ancient anamorphosis technique, by using everyday materials and with rigorous mathematical perfection, generates spaces that are perceived as clean and immaterial, with imaginary volumes.

Here everything is true and nothing really is

Franklin Evans (Reno, USA 1967) presents an installation full of hyper data and colours, in which the viewer can circulate together with the images that become information. The paintings and works on paper that are part of the series FacesFractalsandFeeds (2019) make use of the wealth of image data that populate contemporary space.

Here everything exists and superimposes itself

The recent series of works by Federico Luger (Milan, Italy 1979) are inspired by the popular video game Fortnite and have the representative title All Roads Lead to Fortnite (2020). It takes us into the immaterial reality of our own being. The portraits of the “skins” who live in the “agora” are in fact portraits of their players-proprietors and the representation of their immaterial projection.
In the history of art, besides trying to show the aesthetic constituents of the person represented, portraits recounted the social-cultural context. In the portraits of Federico Luger, instead, the person represented is like choosing to be inside one’s own experience.
In the show, next to the works by Federico Luger, you can also play Fortnite.

Material here becomes extra-material

An interactive show, a trip through time in the hyper-mind. For the occasion there will be published a catalogue full of multimedia content to watch us in this jump.

Spacewar! is a space combat video game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell in collaboration with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders, Steve Piner, and others. It was written for the newly installed DEC PDP-1 minicomputer at the Massatchussets Institute of Technology. It is one of the most important and influential games in the early history of video games.

BIOGRAFIE

Igor Eškinja (Rijeka, Croatia 1975) lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia. His work is to be found in numerous public collections: MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, Italy; MSU Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia; MAC/VAL Musee d’Art Contemporain Val de Marne, Paris, France; MMSU Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, Croatia; FRAC-Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, Nantes, France; CAB Caja De Arte Burgos, Spain; Galerija Umjetnina, Split, Croatia; Department of culture, Madrid,Spain; Zagrebačkabanka Unicredit, Zagreb, Croatia; Hypo-Alpe Adria Bank, Zagreb, Croatia; Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia, Italy. On 20 May 2021 he will be appearing in a
solo show at the Kuntshalle, Bratislava.

Franklin Evans (Reno, USA 1967) has lived and worked in New York from halfway through the 1990s. He graduated from Stanford University (BA), the University of Iowa (MA and MFA Painting) and Columbia University (MBA). He has held almost thirty solo shows at an international level and has taken part in numerous group shows, among which: MoMA PS1, New York, NY; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; sculpture park and museum Cordova, Lincoln, MA; Diverse Works, Houston, TX; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Weatherspoon art museum, Greensboro, NC; Futura, Prague, the Czech Republic; Museo Ivan Bruschi, Arezzo, Italy; the Mikonos Biennale, Greece; collateral show of the Venice Biennale, Italy; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA; Federico Luger (FL GALLERY), Milan, Italy; Ameringer McEnery Yohe, New York, NY; Sue Scott, New York, NY. In June 2021 his work will be shown at the Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY and at the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA, USA.

Federico Luger (Milan, 1979) is an Italian-Caribbean artist who grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, where he lived until he was 21 years old. A naturalised Italian, he lives and works in Milan and Maloja. At 14 years old he arrived in Italy for the first time, a journey that was to mark the life and vision of art of the young Luger. His training began with his teacher Adriana Cifuentes who incentivised him to enrol at the Armando Reveron Academy in Caracas where he studied drawing and painting, also interesting himself in photography and graphic design. On 11 April 2002 the Venezuelan Republic was overturned by a greatest social crisis in its history, and the young Luger, a student and protestor, was attacked by the forces of Chávez who that day dirtied the history of Venezuela with blood. Luger thus found himself overwhelmed by the historical and political affairs of his country of birth and realised that neither the government nor the opposition were able to guarantee democracy and the wellbeing of the State. So Luger decided to sell his car and he began his peregrination around Europe, certain to never go back home. “Had I remained in Venezuela, the pain would have been so great to push me to kill someone; in that moment I believe that millions of Venezuelans had, first lost their head, and then hope. No one would ever have imagined that the situation would have become even worse. The PDVSA petrol company was dead”¹.
After having travelled and wandered around various European cities, he settled in Milan where he continued his studies at the Brera Academy. His sensitivity and passion for art, together with his continuous intellectual research and his need for cultural confrontation and interaction, impelled him in 2005 to open a space in Milan devoted to contemporary art: Federico Luger (FL GALLERY), which brought together a group of international artists, both youngsters and those who had already made a name, with whom he shared the need for continuous research and thought in a reciprocal cultural interchange, and with whom he created strong links of intellectual friendship.
Luger’s interest in art is not circumscribed by the work itself but also extends to the context in which the work lives and is enjoyed, to the thought that generated it and the study that created it. His artistic practice takes the form of an intuitive and experimental analysis in continuous development through various media, above all painting, to which he flanks the creation and curatorship of such projects and shows as The immigrants, Venice 2013, and Advertising the Paradise, A Pick Gallery, Turin 2020.
For Federico Luger art is a necessary concept and, therefore, the generator of a totalising interest of his artistic life as an artist, dealer, curator, organiser, intellectual and, perhaps above all, idealist.
—
1 – The words of Federico Luger, 3^rd May 2021

Galleria Allegra Ravizza
Piazza Cioccaro 7 – first floor
6900 Lugano, Switzerland
Tel: +41 0(91) 2243187
art@allegraravizza.com
www.allegraravizza.com
from Monday to Friday – from 11 am to 6 pm
Saturday by appointment
art@allegraravizza.com
www.allegraravizza.com