Work from the Collection

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

Artist: Davide Balula

Date of creation: 2014-2015

Domain: Painting

Medium: Painting

Materials: Soil particles, Canvas

Collection: Lafayette Anticipations - Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin

Date of acquisition: 2014

Davide Balula, Buried Painting (Room II, Trapdoor I, Palazzo Cavour, Torino), Painting, 2015, Collection Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin © DR

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

À propos de l'artiste

Davide Balula

Born in 1978 in Annecy, France

Nourrie par la science, la musique et la technologie, l’œuvre de l’artiste français Davide Balula oscille entre empirisme et ludisme. L’intérêt qu’il porte aux lois de la physique, de la chimie et aux nouvelles technologies participe d’un même questionnement sur les limites de la perception et de l’imagination. Sa pratique multisensorielle et pluridisciplinaire est constituée d’expérimentations diverses et de rencontres fortuites qui viennent remettre en question le passage du temps.

Né en 1978 à Annecy (France), Davide Balula a étudié la musique contemporaine au conservatoire d’Annecy et les arts plastiques à l’École supérieure d’art Annecy Alpes avant de poursuivre sa formation à l’École supérieure des arts décoratifs de Strasbourg et à l’École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. Il vit et travaille à New York.