HSF by montrasioarte is proud to present High Speed, Smooth Movements, a group exhibition showing works realized by artists during their three-month stay (January-April 2008) at HSF residency program. Curated by Raffaele Bedarida, High Speed, Smooth Movements includes Susy Blu (Italian, video, photography), Reuven Israel (Israeli, sculpture, drawing), and Francesco Tumbiolo (Italian, painting).

Isn’t a high-speed internet connection more exiting than a Donald Judd? (Substantial shifts have occurred since Marinetti wrote that a ride on a roaring car was “more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”). Now a super-fast web connection is perceived as a necessity and slow food/slow sex is practiced as an ideology. Speed is an archetype of modernity, a fetish of post-modernity: in High Speed, Smooth Movements, HSF artists play with its redefinition, respectively at a social, experiential, and perceptive level.

Susy Blu presents Fast Tourism, a series of photographs and a video on the transcontinental ritual of chronometric cultural consumption. In Sicily, the sublime experience of the volcano Aetna is turned into a standard ten-minute walk around a secondary, small crater (with parking and restaurant). In New York, the bridge as symbol of the eternal challenge between natural obstacles and human ingenuity is revised in the touristic walk on the Brooklyn Bridge: not across the river (too long), just half of it.

Reuven Israel exhibits two large drawings and two sculptures. L.V. and Roger Roger are ambiguous shiny things. Israel’s painstaking craftwork turns cheap wood into highly refined plastic-like, industrial-like objects. The iconic L.V. is hung high on the wall as a religious symbol, the kinetic Roger Roger satisfies the viewer’s wish to touch its shiny surface. When pushed, Roger Roger spins, smoothly and uselessly.

Francesco Tumbiolo shows two series of paintings, Bookmarks and Waterproof Memoirs, and a site-specific painting installation, A Study for “As Far as the Dust.” As with a tennis ball, he plays with the perception and interrelation between photography, movement, and experience through time, embodied by the two interrupted tennis players, their game and our gaze. The viewer eyes are not able to grasp the image, they slip on the enameled, glossy surface of, A Study for “As Far as the Dust,” as the gummy black lines flow on the water-proof fabric of Bookmarks and Waterproof Memoirs.