Roderick Hietbrink

PIAC is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Italy of the Dutch artist Roderick Hietbrink (1975).

Starting from the observation of reality, Hietbrink investigates the architectural space by manipulating and deconstructing it in shape, structure and sound. His videoprojections, mostly installations of large dimension which transform the perception of the exhibition space into a sole aesthetic experience of the projected space, approach the composition of the picture according to a pictorial language as well as references to art history. To architecture as a measure of man it refers White Horizon (2005), a videoinstallation projected on a wall of the space at PIAC beyond which, in reality, the plateau extends. To the view on nature, usually visible from the gallery, the artist chooses to superimpose an urban landscape where contemporary office buildings emerge in the distance, enveloped in a thick mist. In this deserted scenery a human figure transits: he bends, as if he wanted to pick up the nothingness of his existential loneliness, then gets up again and leaves the stage. A reference, this one, to the philosophical subject of man in its relation with nature and, in a wider sense, with the social space that surrounds him, which made the artists in the Renaissance epoch introduce the human figure in a natural context or in an architectural frame; and, in recent times, to Antonioni's critique of modernism in The Red Desert, where the inner perturbation of the protagonist Giuliana, interpreted by Monica Vitti, reflects in the disorienting and metallic atmosphere of Ferrara urban outskirts. White Horizon originates, as the artist puts it, Òfrom the need to create order from chaosÓ. The disorienting and dreamlike atmosphere of the slow film sequence is also built up, as it often happens in the work of Hietbrink, by sounds produced with electronic equipment and by field recordings: the loud and monotonous singing of crickets, the shifting of goods containers in a port, the screeching of metallic wires.

Roderick Hietbrink was born in Gorrsel (Netherlands) in 1975. He lives and works between Rotterdam and Istanbul, where in 2005 he received a grant at Platform Garanti. He exhibited in solo and group shows in public and private spaces, among which, in 2004, Delay at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, Corner Corone at the KŸnstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, and Interscape at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau in Amsterdam.

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Roderick Hietbrink
White Horizon