Born in 1979 in Milan where he lives and works.

 

Ā shkhārhātzūytz - Visual Chrestomathy of the Mount Analogue Inland Peak Expedition, 2017

 

The installation is inspired by The Mount Analogue, a symbolic novel of mountaineering geographic adventures by René Daumal, left unfinished due to the premature death of the author.

Āshkhārhātzūytz - Visual Chrestomathy of the Mount Analogue Inland Peak Expedition imagines, through a visual compendium inspired by passages of  Daumal’s novel and its missing part, the mystical topography of the summit of the Mount Analogue, which for the same analogical reason must necessarily be quarried. Introducing inside the external specular landscape, the climb is celebrated in the descent to the abyss where the upper skies are disbanded.

 

In his works, Riccardo Arena develops a creative process founded on the accumulation, collation and study of diverse documents, which, in the process of assemblage, come to reveal accidental and unforeseen potentialities. These potentialities become in themselves active agents in the imagining of new, circumstantial paths of association that evolve independently from the original inspirational impulse. The constant movement between the intuitive gathering of study materials and their internal reconfiguration through the intuitive act is condensed into narrative structures that become the fundamental principle of  the work: collage, films, drawings, archive objects, texts and animations, are all orchestrated into a visual constellation in mutual dialogue, becoming a vehicle for multiple references and interpretations.

 

 

2016: Maxxi Prize, Maxxi Museum, Rome, Italy; Quadrıennale d’Arte, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy 2015: Vavilon - Viafarini, Milan, Italy; The Man Who Sat On Himself, Fondazione Sandretto Re-Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; 2014: Scenario Di Terra, MART, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento e Rovereto, Italy 2013: Il Giardino Dei Sentieri , Oct Contemporary Art Terminal Shanghai, China; Arimortis, Museo del Novecento, Milan, Italy 2011: Muerte Dual Ellero, Galeria Wussmann, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Padigione Italia nel Mondo, 54th Venice Biennial ; 2007: The Mills of God Grind Slowly, Knap Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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