While reading the Vladimir Nabokov’s Transparent Things, I felt particularly mesmerized with the enormous quantity of colors that were used by the author to describe everything, from landscapes to feelings, from thoughts to memories. I decided to read the novel once again and underline with a fluorescent green marker, page by page, any mentioned color. This simple operation gave place to an open process of complex production of work that took me about one year. The result is the installation on the solo show Transparent Things made in Buenos Aires in 2010. The exhibition included the edition of the book Colors in Transparent Things, which is about a carefully and hyper-detailed literal transcription of all the colors used by Nabokov in his novel. This transcription experiment ends up like a tale without story, as a kind of incandescent visual story that in its images preserves all the potential narrative essence of things, places and situations depicted in the novel. Written in the catalogue main text, Claudio Iglesias notes that: “… Bertone has removed all the information but the description of colors: apple-green, skyblue-green grass, reptile-green are some of the increasingly inventive color shades that uses the author in his maturity. This piece not only brings out the importance of colors in Nabokov´s descriptions, but allows us to understand how this highly metaphorical concepts become chromatic information. Aside the constrains the narrative representation system may impose, Nabokov´s colors are a kind of free fall.”
Self published10×14.5 cm, 40 pp, black and white laser, saddle-stitched, 2011
Edition of 3 A/P English-Italian signed copies and 17 regular copies
20 euro
More info: http://bertonecarla.wix.com/carlabertone#!transparent-things/c1bxn
Carla Bertone, born in Buenos Aires, lives and works in Berlin. She received her Bachelor as Visual Artist at Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón in 1997. In 2004 she presented her degree thesis, Genealogy in the Argentinean Geometric Tradition: Yente-Diyi Laañ-Lidy Prati, including interviews of artists from the Argentinean Geometric Avant-garde of the 40´s. This work was published in Ramona Magazine of visual arts (number 62, July 2006). Bertone has been exhibiting work since 2000. She has participated in many group shows in Argentina and abroad, among them: Art & Design Abroad, Argentinian Art&Design, Mueso delle Scienze Naturali, Turin, Italy 2012; Suite vol. I, Cristiani Art Gallery, Turin, Italy 2012; PintorAs, Casa Argentina, Paris, France 2011; Art Book Editions, NOPX, Turin, Italy 2011; Diverso, Galería Masottatorres Arte, 2008; Buenos Aires Art, Eyestorm, London, 2007; Anonymous Drawings, Meinblau, Berlin, 2007; D, Belleza y Felicidad, 2006; Abstract Art (today) = fragility + resiliency, CCEBA, 2005; An Imaginary Value , Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2005. Solo exhibitions include Three is a magic number, Nopx, Turin, Italy 2103; Transparent Things, Fundacion F Klemm, Buenos Aires 2010; Diamond, El Aleph, Buenos Aires, 2008 and Vertex Crystal, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires 2006. Bertone´s practice use geometric abstraction as a way of reflecting our vulnerability and uncertainty, as a way of understanding and also inventing the world that surrounds us. We could say that in some way the whole body of her work is focused on the aim of catching viewers’ perception and get them to contemplation.