Work from the Collection

Buried Painting (Room II, Trapdoor I, Palazzo Cavour, Torino)

Artist: Davide Balula
Date: 2014-2015
Medium: Painting
Materials: Soil particles, Canvas
Collection: Lafayette anticipations - Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin
Domain: Peinture
Davide Balula collects, collates, and organises the indices of memory. Reactivating the recording device which he inaugurated at the Frank Elbaz gallery in 2012, he made new Buried Paintings at the Palazzo Cavour in Turin in 2015. The eponymous diptych, mounted on a single frame, became tinged with the tones of its incubation. The earth was piled up under a wooden floor equipped with trapdoors, in which Davide Balula buried linen canvases for several weeks. When they were unearthed, their surface showed the minute movements of underground life. Through this form of katabasis and then anabasis, the artist proceeds, in his own words, to take “samples”, to “permanently archive” what nature hides from the eye. The Buried Paintings series is thus a “form of photography”, to use Marc Lenot’s words, except that here it is to the dark that this flat surface is exposed before revealing itself in a light-filled room.

Exhibitions

Eugène Leroy
MUba - Musée des beaux-arts Eugène Leroy, Tourcoing (France)
from 28 Apr to 02 Oct 2022
Cosmogonies
MAMAC de Nice, Nice (France)
from 09 Jun to 19 Sep 2018
Shit & Die
Palazzo Cavour, Turin (Italie)
from 06 Nov 2014 to 11 Jan 2015
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