Due to various circumstances, we started meeting regularly, so every time he comes to Italy we meet, have a chat, discuss. We have become friends. And as it sometimes happens when an artist and a gallery owner become friends, at one point we thought: “Why don’t we do ‘something’ together?”

This ‘something’ turned into a project that Danilo called D.W.Y.L. which includes a new series of works almost all made specifically for the gallery.

 

D.W.Y.L. is the acronym of Do What You Love, but also of Don’t Waste Your Life. The title instantly reveals the subjects associated with Correale’s research concerning the present and future of work, cognitive and precarious forms of employment, whether immaterial or ‘reputational,’ as well as the relationship with the media and the critique of prevailing economic systems.

D.W.Y.L. is an exhibition that uses a cinematic method, whose starting point recalls the ‘choose your own adventure’ scheme, as in fact the viewer is asked to fill cognitive gaps specific to the works on display.

 

D.W.Y.L. opens with a series of mirrors equipped with audio devices from which we can listen to a sonic theater piece taking place in an apartment akin to the gallery space. In it, four characters talk about the sense of time and work, about ‘coming of age’ or its impossibility, all alluding to the piece which the audience can already sneak a peek of in the next room of the gallery. By forcing us to look at ourselves, through the piece that welcomes the visitors, the artist establishes the position of centrality of the audience, suggesting a journey into a temporal and psychological dimension, leaving the past behind to consciously enter the present.

 

A theme that has always been an object of investigation by Danilo Correale is the relationship between work/free time/sleep and boredom. Sebastian, the installation-sculpture placed in the second room, could exemplify this relationship. Sebastian could be considered as the emblem of fatigue, of the “material effort needed to do a job,” but also as the exact opposite: indicating one who, deceived by the saying “Do What You Love and you’ll never work a day in your life”, now finds himself in a loveless labyrinth, poised between identity and the constant dissipation of cognitive resources.

The body of the piece is so heavy that its passage creates grooves in the floor in an unnatural motion, driven by external factors as if they were the unstoppable gears of an invisible engine in continuous evolution, drawing Sebastian’s indefinite path.

 

A series of notes, of ‘sinister’ drawings (because the artist drew them with his left hand, which is not his dominant hand), completes the project. Correale uses sheets with printings of vignettes used in psychotherapy, which the patient is asked to “complete with the appropriate word.” Here the idea of fatigue takes on another meaning for which the effort of those who draw with the ‘wrong’ hand is contrasted by the struggle of the mind in searching for the correct word, in order to exemplify a state of mind or a recurring thought.

Danilo Correale is an artist and researcher born in 1982 in Naples, Italy, lives and works between New York and Naples.

 He has exhibited in international exhibitions such as Manifesta 8, Istanbul Biennial, Moscow Biennial, Wien Biennia,l Kiev and Riga Biennial, Quadriennale di Roma, Milan Design Triennial, Ural Biennial. Institutions that have hosted Danilo Correale's works include, MAXXI IT, Z33 Museum of Design NL , Het Niue Institue NL, Rubin Art Fundation US, Magazzino Italian Art USS, Extra City BE, Hassel Museum USA, Aksioma SL, MAMBO IT, MUSEION IT, Fondazione Sandretto Rebaudengo, Kunstalle Wien, Kadist Art Fundation FR and more. Danilo Correale has been given numerous institutional solo shows including Art In General NY, Mac Belfast IR, Careof IT, La Loge BE, Peep Hole, IT, Entree NO.