San Carlo is pleased to present Mark Handforth, White-Light-Whirlwind, the second show of San Carlo Cremona to be held in the 17th-century church of San Carlo in Via Bissolati 33, Cremona. Mark Handforth’s solo show will be on view from March the 18th to May the 31st, 2022. For the first year of the project San Carlo (September 2021 - September 2022) the artist Servane Mary has invited artists friends to exhibit in the space of San Carlo Cremona. Each exhibition will be a site specific solo presentation of each artist’s work that will feature various media spanning from sculpture, painting, film to sound installations and performance. Servane Mary’s exhibition comprised of three paintings, monumental in scale, 16 x 16 feet (5x5 meters), inaugurated the San Carlo project in September 2021. It featured a body of work she had created specifically for the church, responding to its architecture and volume. The second exhibition, opening on March the 18th, 2022, is “White-Light-Whirlwind” by the artist Mark Handforth, consisting of an impressive 16-meters high light drawing that rises, twists and expands into the baroque dome of San Carlo church.
White-Light-Whirlwind is a monumental drawing with light. Balanced precariously on a single point, the sculpture rises, twists and expands 16 meters high into the baroque dome of San Carlo church. Standing yet floating, balanced yet hanging, the sculpture shifts perceptively between an unreal vision and its massive chandelier-like reality. The Whirlwind, maybe a metaphor for our strange state of being of the last few years, was always seen as the physical manifestation of base earth touching the heavens. In the sculpture, everyday fluorescent lights draw jagged lines of electric light - whites, off whites and violet-whites - to describe a monumental vortex, spinning up from the floor to the arc of the dome. Half sublime, half Times-Square sign. Both things are true. By its doubling of meaning, the sculpture mirrors its own basic reality and ours. We too are effervescent, sublime beings happily enough stuck to the ground and the sidewalk. Beauty exists in this duality, the one is only visible through the other. The interior space of San Carlo church becomes a metaphysical landscape, an open conversation between the glory of the architecture, its deep resonance as a spiritual home and the sculpture sitting both within and apart from that. A kind of meeting, a talking, a duality that touches both the sculpture itself and the exhibition space that hosts it.
Mark Handforth was born in 1969 in Hong Kong, China. He currently lives and works in Miami. He is known on the international scene for his large sculptures that arise from the comparison with the estranged proportions of American metropolis and the elements of the urban landscape. Altering the materials and the relationship of scale, his work develops a sculpture research that is both serious and ironic, Minimal and Pop, monumental and melancholic. The artist’s intervention on the symbols of everyday life generates a repertoire of absurd objects, endowed with an impetuous and unexpected physicality. Mark Handforth’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in the United Staes and in Europe, these include: “Cypress violets and cypress reds” at Parco d’art Sandretto Rebaudengo (2020); “Trash can candles” at Modern Art in London (2019); “Ugo Rondinone: I love John Giorno” at Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2015) and “Mapping the studio” at Palazzo Grassi in Venice (2008). Handforth’s large sculptures have been exhibited at Central Park in New York; at the Dallas Museum of Art and at the MCA in Chicago. Handforth’s works are part of the collection of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, of François Pinault’s collection, of the collection of the Museums of Contemporary Art of LA, and of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
