Ironic or desecrating manipulator of styles, Christian Holstad uses different expressive methods with ease - sculpture, installation, drawing, collage, assemblage, video and performance - for visionary forays into spaces and situations that play a role of revisiting or rehabilitating the most diverse imaginaries .
The American artist's first solo show in Italy, the exhibition presents installations, sculptures and unpublished drawings, a personal and raw itinerary that pushes itself to investigate the contradictions of contemporary American society. An introspective story articulated in 12 successive stations. Between rises and falls, creativity and desecration, the exhibition revisits the salient stages of Christian Holstad 's production , including some of the American artist's most famous works: the sculptures mobiles made with used clothes, hangers and accessories; snakes made of precious fabrics; a series of unpublished drawings on newsprint and gold leaf. Holstad's art is viscerally linked to his dexterity, in some cases transforming clothes and costumes into a bestiary, as happens with the snakes in Defined Through Deflation and Limits of Exposure (2004/2005).
Structured in two adjoining rooms, the exhibition opens with a "votive chapel" made with wooden planks nailed together, on the walls of which twelve unpublished drawings are posted, retracing a personal via crucis. And a second room, where the lighting is turned upside down and the works hanging from the ceiling are linked together by chains that form an improbable candelabrum. Also in this case we are dealing with twelve stations, twelve introspective stages, an itinerary between vision and hallucinations, falls and ascents on Mount Calvary traveled by the contemporary American community.
"And it is precisely American society - writes Milovan Farronato - in its paradoxes, myths, ideologies and contradictions, his privileged field of investigation. In these meanders his "sentimental research" and his hypothetical confession take place. The legendary Marilyn Monroe, the pop icon Maria Veronica Ciccone, the inauspicious and grotesque case of Superman Christopher Reeve are some of the characters that Holstad has investigated in as many works, and together with them recent and past news stories. by Holstad seem to emphasize American "domination" and "consumerism": American Standard or American Express. Beyond the more properly sculptural and installation production, each drawing by him has the images and articles of the most important American magazines as a basis and support ".