On 13 May 2022 at 7 pm, during Arte Fiera, Studio Legale Iusgate, Via Castiglione 81, Bologna, opens Cave Canem, an exhibition by Daniele Cabri organised by Studio Cenacchi Arte Contemporanea, with a critical essay by Maria Chiara Wang.

This is Cabri’s second solo exhibition organised by Studio Cenacchi. As in his previous show, the Modena-based artist works on animal hides, using a blowtorch and pyrograph to mark and transform their surfaces.

Cabri has always moved freely between different forms of expression. From an early age, his practice encompassed painting, sculpture, video and performance. In recent years, however, he has felt the need to bring his research onto what he considers an ‘ultimate’ or ‘final’ support: animal skin.

Whether exploring the memories of people from a small village in the Apennines, as in Ad lunam (2021), or addressing relationships between men and women and our increasingly complex relationship with technology, as in Cave Canem, Cabri returns to fundamental questions of human experience. At a particularly difficult moment in history, his work asks us to reconnect with what is deepest and most essential within ourselves — the enduring themes to which art has always returned.

Maria Chiara Wang writes:

“Daniele Cabri’s solo exhibition centres on the installation Saturn Devouring His Children. The work pays a double tribute to art history. Its title refers to Francisco Goya’s painting of the same name (1820–1823), while the covered faces of the two figures make explicit reference to René Magritte’s The Lovers (1928).

The figures are burned onto two animal hides with a blowtorch and pyrograph, then joined by ropes and electrical wires. On one level, they suggest the brutalisation of contemporary society, driven by animal impulses. On another, they present a portrait of love today: a relationship deprived of sight and touch, in which communication has broken down and pleasure has become cynical and individualistic. What emerges is an image of humanity made up of exposed, naked bodies, driven by a pornographic and narcissistic form of pleasure. Its immediacy and transparency mark the end of the ritual of seduction, which depends instead on time, anticipation and gradual revelation.

These are bodies driven by desire, exchanging information and data through an electronic device. The smartphone placed between the lovers becomes a ‘non-place’, in Marc Augé’s sense of the term: a space designed for circulation, consumption and communication which, unlike an anthropological place, has no identity, relationships or history. For the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, digital communication is disembodied and extensive. It creates connections rather than relationships, providing an immediate outlet for fleeting impulses. […]

We can therefore understand Daniele Cabri’s research as anthropological and ethnological in character. His art reflects, articulates and responds to the very contemporary world from which that research 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