Girotondo: Round Dance Exhibition Catalog

Girotondo: Round Dance

Hadas Glazer

Girotondo in Italian means round dance, the type of popular folk dance common among many societies and cultures, each with its typical style, based on the perfect circle. Round dances express a desire for a complete and harmonic arrangement of a group of people, representing thereby the yearning for a non-hierarchical equal society. The exhibition title comes from Michele Bubacco’s monumental work, shown here for the first time.

The exhibition’s central ideas and concepts originate in the world of dance: movement, rest, rotation, and troupe. These ideas merge and reflect in the paintings and glass sculptures and indicate the relations between movement and creation – two expressive forms. Some of the works represent movement and figures uniting, others pay attention to pauses and gaps between bodies. Pina Bausch, a leading figure in modern dance, created works inspired by visual art. Bausch redefined the ties between art, life and dance, with human relations at the center: the difficulties and traumas they involve and the gentleness and compassion they bring to human life. Her works paved the way for unbridled dance in which the boundaries between madness and synchronization are constantly transgressed, just as in neoexpressionist art. The works in the exhibition are informed by the history of art and dance and are enmeshed in an intricate dialogue in which contradictory values coexist – physical enjoyment and spiritual elevation, unruliness and sophistication, attraction to another and fear of intimacy and attachment.

Another link between dance and the artworks on display is the relation of movement and sight. “The artist changes the world into paintings. To understand [this] we must go back to the working, actual body—not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement” – wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 1 His essay “The Primacy of Perception” enumerates on the connection between what the eyes receive from the external world and the seer’s internal and spiritual interpretation. According to the French philosopher, the eye traces the space of life and therefore movement in space is the natural continuation of seeing. Dance stretches the limits of the body, while plastic art, created through the artist’s bodily movements, stretches the limits of matter. Approaching the limits of the body or the material manifests the connection between physical object and spiritual existence.

As the works of the exhibition show, the physical bodies of artists have a vital role in instilling spirit into the material. Ofer Lellouch transforms his spiritual experience into painting; Michele Bubacco produces a performance-like painting using a dishwashing sponge, thereby imprinting the markings of his body into his painting; Sara Benninga’s series of paintings hangs in a row in the studio, conjuring the sense of a dance consisting of movement and pauses; Julius Weiland sculpts in industrial glass which he melts at high temperature, forcing him to act fast before the glass cools and sets; in Sphere, the glass egg created by Vaclav Cigler, the perfect geometric shape marks the search for a clear and pure aesthetic essence.

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. Carleton Dallery, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 2.

Julius Weiland’s sculptures are made from industrial glass tubes, pipes and straws. Weiland cuts, shapes and joins these objects by welding them at high temperature. The heat deforms the upright shape of the glass cones, an act of morphing that highlights their incongruous nature – industrial and uniform, and fragile and unique. The glass sculptor creates his works with great heat and speed anticipating the moment the glass will cool and acquire its mixed shape. The elements in Weiland’s sculptures merge and separate, their edges seem broken and sharp yet are in fact polished. Weiland seeks a balance between the material’s fluidity and limpness and the stability and growth of the details, which is made possible through their mutual reliance.

Sara Benninga’s paintings examine the border separating enjoyment and vice. The paintings depict dancing figures attempting to be liberated from their concrete state. The paintings were created as a development of Benninga’s series Bacchanalia, which deals with people’s joy and the places where it transgresses into undefined wildness. As in Bacchanalia the paintings in the exhibition also question the origin of pleasure and the definition of sin in human cultures. The figures are immersed in a dance that lacks a constant rhythm. They desire an ecstatic, even meditative experience that expands and transcends their bodily existence. In contrast to the bold, wild corporality are paintings of moments of rest and pause, in which the figures detach from their internal sensations and gaze outward. The paintings hint at the figures’ moods – their sense of emptiness and their connection or detachment from their surroundings. The figures are as separate as they are merged. The encounter with the surroundings or with others, which is naturally a meeting of exhilaration and expectations, allows forming new reciprocal relations.

Two works by the Czech artist Vàclav Cigler displayed in the exhibition expresses artistic and phenomenological notions. Cigler uses perfect, minimalistic geometric shapes to achieve harmony and to understand how the meeting of light and material creates an experience of pure, transcendent truth. Although his works are completely abstract and lack decorative or narrative elements, they are full of metaphoric meaning. The sculpture Sphere represents perfection, elevation, universality and wealth through the transparency of its material and the passage of light through it. The red glass egg is a condensation of sorts of the life force erupting from within it, and its two halves change from transparency to obscureness. The graphite drawing, Drawing 2, represents some kind of energetic sphere that moves from the center to the edges. The drawing and the sculpture correspond with the works around them to create a sense of energetic force that diffuses from a powerful core sending waves to the other parts of the exhibition.