Few would dare compete for an audience’s attention when up against a panoramic view of the Mediterranean. Fewer still might consider expanding a successful London commercial gallery into the comparatively under-developed city of Naples. However, Thomas Dane’s triumphant project space space reflects just how refreshing the decision to break away from the ubiquitous model of white box galleries in established art-world hot spots can prove.
Thomas Dane first ‘fell in love with [Naples’] chaotic beauty and authenticity’ in 1995, but he only decided to open a gallery in the city in 2018, after discovering a dilapidated space which had once housed the German consulate. He felt compelled by the way that artists responded to the city, which stands for something very different to international art centres like New York, London, Hong Kong and Milan. The space was guided by a desire to break away from the global art market treadmill, and to create a project space which engaged with a more local artistic community on less frenetic timeline.
Luisa Lambri’s exhibition is emblematic of the fruitfulness of this considered approach. The Milanese artist worked on a series of pictures which respond to local buildings and which were designed to hang in the gallery’s palatial enfilade. Collaboration is at the heart of this project, with local families granting access to usually private spaces, and a foundation supporting contemporary engagement with Pompeii’s classical heritage providing Lambri with an animating local awareness.
Lambri’s photographic practise is focussed on exploring idiosyncratic elements of architecture, often creating ‘abstract portraits’ - a concept reinforced through her consistently oriented frames - from their surfaces. Her pictures often reject structural and decorative features in favour of details, which refuse to stand in for the whole building, but instead reframe our focus on building materials and the processes of weathering which occur over time.
In this series, which forms a kind of installation through the coherent unfolding of the gallery’s rooms, Lambri reexamines two icons of the region’s rich art history: Modernist architect Gio Ponti’s Royal Continental Hotel and frescos situated at the Parco dei Principi in Sorrento. Using straight lines as her compositional focus, Lambri’s camera is drawn to see these works from unusual perspectives. Ignoring the frescoes figurative functionality and narrative potential, she looks instead to these works’ ornamental frames for a united structural emphasis. The results reveal subtle elements, so often ignored by visitors in crowded settings on tight timelines, with kaleidoscopic surfaces redolent of a less often repeated history.
Less successful is the addition of Lambri’s photographs of artworks by Doug Wheeler and Edward Krasinski, which serve to undermine the gentle rhythm of unsung linearity revealed in the other, less obvious works. However, the overall exhibition is an exercise in elegant restraint, with the gallery’s iconoclastic vision posing a tranquil, eloquently provocative riposte to the frenzied hot-house of the contemporary international art market.
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