On the occasion of Arte Fiera 2022, the exhibition Cave canem by Daniele Cabri opens on 13 May at 7 pm at Studio Legale Iusgate, Via Castiglione 81, Bologna. The show is organised by Studio Cenacchi Arte Contemporanea and features a critical text by Maria Chiara Wang.

This second solo exhibition by the Modena-based artist at the gallery once again presents works created on animal leather, worked with blowtorch and pyrography. Cabri’s practice — spanning painting, sculpture, video and performance since his early years — has in recent times found a definitive support in leather, conceived as a final and essential surface.

Whether reflecting on the memory of inhabitants of a small Apennine village (Ad lunam, 2021) or exploring the relationship between man and woman and humanity’s connection with technology (Cave canem), Cabri invites us to reconnect with deeper, essential themes — particularly relevant in a complex historical moment.

As Maria Chiara Wang writes:

“The exhibition finds its core in the installation Saturno che divora i propri figli. The work is a double homage to art history: its title references Goya’s painting (1820–1823), while the hooded figures recall Magritte’s Les Amants (1928).

Rendered with blowtorch and pyrography on two animal skins connected by ropes and electric wires, the figures evoke both the brutalisation of contemporary society and the condition of modern love: a relationship deprived of vision and contact, marked by cynical and individualistic pleasure. What emerges is a portrait of a humanity of exposed bodies, subject to a pornographic and narcissistic impulse that seals the end of seduction as a ritual — once defined by duration, delay and progressive revelation.

These are instinct-driven bodies exchanging information through an electronic device. The smartphone at the centre becomes a ‘non-place’, as defined by Marc Augé: a space of circulation, consumption and communication, lacking identity, relation and history. Digital communication, as noted by Byung-Chul Han, is disembodied and extensive: it produces connections rather than relationships, driven by momentary impulses and immediate release. […]

Daniele Cabri’s research can ultimately be understood as anthropo-ethnological, reflecting, expressing and responding to the very contemporaneity from which it emerges.”

Daniele Cabri
Cave canem
Curated by Maria Chiara Wang and Jacopo Cenacchi
Critic text by Maria Chiara Wang

13 > 26 May 2022

GALLERIA STUDIO CENACCHI
Sede Iusgate
Via Castiglione 81
40124 Bologna

OPENING HOURS
Monday–Friday: 9 am–1 pm and 3–6 pm
Saturday and Sunday: closed