Antony Gormley 'Body Space Time'
At JJ we are always up for a splash of serendipity, a lucky accident, one of those moments where, low on inspiration and patience, the universe unfolds before you in such a way as to suggest there’s more, something else around the bend worth sticking around for, instead of calling it a day.
And so it was under the bleaching glare of the Tuscan sun this summer when, after a morning in San Gimignano slaloming through the hordes of recently bussed in gelato huffing tourists in 42 degrees of breezeless heat, we were just about ready to go find somewhere dark, cool and quiet to wait it out until the more sedate evening replaced the sapping madness of high season Tuscany.
That’s when we noticed a sign indicating that San Gimignano’s very own Galleria Continua happened to be hosting a show by Antony Gormley, not at one of its other far flung outposts, but right here in this very town. We wasted no time getting ourselves down to the largest of the 3 spaces occupied by the gallery in the center of the old walled town, and over the subsequent hour and a half were introduced not just to one of the most beautiful exhibition spaces, but also the most affecting work by Gormley which I have ever seen.
The main exhibition space is comprised of a series of rooms, radiating from what was, and continues to be San Gimigano’s main theatre, however it doesn’t tend to see much conventional usage these days, and according to one of the gallery staff we spoke with, hasn’t done so for a number of years. Instead the ground area where once the stalls would have stood, has been repurposed as exhibition space for those artists with the vision and confidence to do be able to do it justice. And this is no small ask, given the unfiltered beauty of this art deco theatre.
In spite of the fact that these sumptuous surroundings needed no further adornment, Gormley was still up for giving it a shot, and this show, designed specifically for this space, was billed as a continuation of his ‘lifelong investigation of the body as place and the structuring of space’. Make of that what you will, but the manifestation of his ambition took the form of an array of delicate, interconnected stainless steel space frames which greeted the visitor on first stepping over the threshold, juxtaposed with a scattering of solid iron structures, loosely resembling abstract forms of the human body, which were thoughtfully placed in various corners and rooms tucked away within the bowels of the gallery space. Some of these had been milled and polished to a high sheen, while some looked as if they had been dug out of the earth or retrieved from the depths of the ocean, with a patina of rust and time writ large on their raw surfaces.
Rather than trying to reconcile the pompous, overly intellectualised pamphlet propaganda which usually accompanies these things in a bid to justify what can often turn out to be nothing more than pretentious musings, we decided to just let the thing stand on its own and see how it hit us, after all anything with a scrap of integrity shouldn’t have to be explained to you before you can appreciate it, in fact the joy of immersion comes from the process of finding a way to interpret and relate to what is in front of you, ambiguity is essential.
Of the many pieces collected here, I found one particularly affecting. Tucked away behind the stage in the theatre, in a room big enough to amplify a sense of alienation and loneliness, a prone figure in the corner seemed to be trying to retreat from the harsh gaze of a judgemental world. At least this was the reading I afforded it. Either way it was a breathless moment, on rounding the corner leading into the room which I was unprepared for and made the entire exhibition fall into place in my mind. Both Galleria Continua, and Antony Gormley are to be commended for maintaining both an examplary gallery space and a standard of content curation in a town which could, in less concerned stewardship, have easily reverted to nothing more than the usual tourist oriented money making machine.
