Gently Brut

Villa Arson, from March 1st to August 25th 2024, Nice.

Gently Brut is our latest solo show, curated by Vittorio Parisi at Villa Arson, Niece.

From Vittorio’s curatorial text:

« We are in 2068 and throughout the world students have regained control of what is left of universities. »

“When asked to imagine the future of art schools, Parasite 2.0, a collective of architects and designers at the crossroads of architectural conception, scenography and the visual arts, began with this thought. With a leap through time, tasting more like the distant past.
Perhaps this scenario went through their minds as they walked through the studios, galleries, pathways, terraces and gardens of the Villa Arson, a school which encourages its students to appropriate the spaces and to make them come alive.
Dedicated since the mid 1980s to a type of experimentation where everything becomes hybrid and intermingled, the Villa Arson is several things simultaneously. Both school and art center, building and garden, 18th century villa and “outstanding contemporary building”, made of raw concrete and stones from the Var.
In such a context, Parasite 2.0 conceived Gently Brut as a series of specific interventions distributed around the original villa and the architecture created by Michel Marot in 1960, considered to be one of the most singular examples of brutalism in France.
As the title of the exhibition suggests, the interventions are carried out in opposition to the architecture and embody its contradictions: the roughness of the concrete is softened by the use of textile, the brutalist grey by colored pigments, the monumental scale by human scale, and the rigorous conception by the spontaneity of the creative gesture.”

Team:
Stefano Colombo
Carlo Costanzo
Eugenio Cosentino
Luca Marullo

Ph. Stefano Colombo