Galerie Martin Janda curated by Francesco Pedraglio
„To Do Without So Much Mythology“

Francesco Pedraglio is an artist, a writer and an editor living in Mexico City. He has been showing and performing, amongst others, at GAMEC Bergamo (Italy, 2020); Norma Mangione Gallery, Turin (Italy, 2019); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (UK, 2018); Netwerk Aalst, Aalst (Belgium, 2017) Kunstverein Munich (Germany, 2017); CRAC Alsace (France, 2017). A collection of poems, short stories and performance scripts titled Battles–Vol. I is published by Book Works (London, UK) in July 2021. Spoken Sculptures, a collection of five scripts for sculptures was published by Juan de la Cosa / John of the Thing (Mexico) in 2018. His novel A Man in a Room Spray Painting a Fly (or at least trying to) was published by Book Works (London, UK) in 2014. Together with artist Tania Pérez Córdova, Pedraglio runs the publishing project Juan de la Cosa / John of the Thing.

to do without so much mythology

 

(...) With the arrival of modernity and scientific thinking, the myth had to migrate into the peripheries of storytelling… into the curious, the weird, even the morbid. And nowadays a potential residue of mythical thinking might be found in that suspension of logic underlining our relationship to the comic and the tragic… two fields where feelings, habits and archetypes dominate as moulding forces.

 

Again: what has all this to do with art? A lot. That’s why here you’ve got two shows. Two exhibitions running parallel to each other. One visible (with works by 5 artists: Beth Collar, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Sophie Jung, Lukas Thaler, Kostis Velonis), the other invisible (with spoken pieces by writers and artists Bob Kil, Paul Becker, Holly Pester, Luis Felipe Fabre, Sarah Tripp). The first show is silent, the second spoken. One exhibition becomes the shadow of the other, and yet they are both completely interchangeable. Like the two sides of the same coin, like comedy and tragedy existing together, only together. Silent objects and bodiless words, both treating the idea of the comic as a mythological category of thinking, something that is all praxis, pre-reasoning, no real separation between concept and object. And yet everything here exists only thanks to an agreement between the two parts, between what is left there to be seen and who sees it. I have no real answer. I don’t exactly know what all this has to do with art. And I guess that’s the show.

 

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