ACTION FANTASY

PIANO PERFORMANCE / VIDEO INSTALLATION

A piano performance and serial video installation by Emanuele Becheri (b. Prato, 1973) for Gallery Weekend Berlin.

Emanuele Becheri’s new work for Gallery Weekend Berlin integrates a noise concert with the installation of a series of the artist’s video works that reinforce themes underlying his noise performance. These in turn contravene ideas implicit in the earliest noise concerts of Italian Futurism a century ago, works that remain among the most paradigmatic expressions of Modernism.

“My work is linked to the piano because the piano is linked to fantasia. This is a process of approaching the classical through the instrument of the classical. The classical has a nature that is unfaithful to nature; the only way to escape this confusion is by means of a chaos that is more important.”

On these grounds, the artist regards his utter lack of training in music or the technique of piano playing as a necessary precondition for his enterprise: “To attain the classical without any technical knowledge, without any knowledge of the instrument is an oxymoron. Therein lies the mystery of the creative act.”

Drew Hammond, Berlin, 2015