David Reimondo show at Museo Novecento, Florence

The installation Frammenti di un discorso amoroso by David Reimondo, curated by Gaspare Luigi Marcone, inaugurates the Museo Novecento’s new cycle Ora et labora, conceived by the artistic director Sergio Risaliti. Reimondo has reflected on the celebrated text by Roland Barthes Frammenti di un discorso amoroso (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments) published in 1977. With his theories on language and meaning, the French intellectual has become a point of reference for semiology and literary criticism, involving other disciplines such as psychoanalysis and sociology. For almost a decade, Reimondo has been working on “language”, creating a synthesis sui generis (featuring ideograms, pictograms and glyphs among other elements) and producing new “graphemes” and new “phonemes”. A project that came into being as a perennial work in progress, adaptable and open to development through diverse media, from the most traditional to the contemporary. Reimondo’s utopia is an ecumenical vision of interpersonal exchanges with the development of new “symbols”.
The installation Frammenti di un discorso amoroso is a site specific work for the loggia on the first floor of the Museo Novecento composed of a metallic mesh with around 11,000 RGB LEDs; the large-scale grid (around 1.3 x 20 metres) has been assembled and welded by hand, while the RGB LEDs are carriers of a contemporary message. On this huge “screen”, “fragments” of the new “symbols” developed by Reimondo form and dissolve. Evoking certain sections of Barthes’ book, the artist has created video sequences using natural seeds that, arranged to construct one of his “symbols”, are then broken up by a jet of air from a compressor. These sequences have been transferred to digital files to allow the “moving images” to be projected on the LED mesh. Essentially, the symbols for “embrace”, “heart” or “magic” compose and disintegrate rhythmically on this screen with a movement that starts from the “heart” of the installation and spreads towards the sides with an uninterrupted opening and closing. The “natural seeds” coexist with the “artificial seeds”, that is to say, the LEDs; these fragments fully define the artist’s symbols only if the work is observed from a distance while as one approaches more closely an insubstantial mosaic of metal and almost indecipherable lights emerges.
In an era in which technology is associated with the production of “impeccable” mass produced objects of industrial design, the artist has instead opted for a craft approach dictated by meticulous manual work that involves an inevitable element of imperfection and casuality. Reimondo also indirectly reflects on the term “installation” used in both the artistic and information technology fields. In this work it is the screen (hardware) that adapts to the video (software), redefining the relationship between medium and message.