Salvatore

Panatteri

SALVATORE PANATTERI

09/07/2007

SALVATORE PANATTERI UNTITLED (TO DAN FLAVIN) H29, BRUSSELS

In 2006, Panatteri installed Untitled (Chromakey Green) at Counterpoint Project Space in Melbourne. Comprising two series of works from his ongoing Chromakey project, they were highly reflective of both gallery space and the light entering its end-windows, making his use of the Chromakey green effective. Deployed in photography and film as an ‘invisible’ background upon which images are ‘keyed in’, this suggests that the focus of his work is the transformation of the virtually ‘invisible’, or non-colour, into concrete form.

A similar notion underpins the works in his monochromatic series, Untitled (To Dan Flavin); produced by exposing sheets of photographic paper to the colour temperature of fluorescent light for different lengths of time, the final ‘colour’ of each work - a white square with the green tinge of fluorescent light - varies according to the time of exposure.

Herein, the materials used in both series also implicate light as a concern in Panatteri’s work; as the Chromakey paint/photographic paper are affected by light, so too is the perception of his work by the human eye, colour being wavelengths of light transmitted from a surface that is in turn dependent on the materiality of that surface.

This in turn suggests that the processes of production and reception are also important to his work; it is through these that Panatteri effectively enables the materials to ‘express’ - or justify - themselves as objects in - and of - time and space.

These reductive and reflexive methodologies are idioms of the modernist Minimalist exercise to which they at once pay homage and extend, as is their modularity and seriality. Likewise, as with some of Minimalism, his deployment of a universal abstract (geometric) language and a machine-made aesthetic - removing the presence of the artist - builds on aspects of Russian Constructivism; Dan Flavin’s fluorescent sculptures - as both ready-mades and monuments to industrialisation - are a prime example, especially his "monuments" for V. Tatlin (hence Panatteri’s reference in the above work).

However, the point of departure from these modernist -isms lies in the conceptual underpinning of Panatteri’s work, which lies in the realm of new/digital media. While the ‘light’ photographs reference the ‘invisible’ photons that enable information to travel in virtual space, his ongoing Chromakey project explores the increasing abstraction of imagery that is enabled in virtual space.

Finally, against these abstract fields of (non-)colour that reference new media, Panatteri’s method of installation should be mentioned. Using architectural space as a three-dimensional framing device and component part of his work, he combines and extrapolates principles of Minimalism, Conceptualism and Site-Specificity. This suggests that he is addressing a conflict between the phenomenology of experiencing art in an expanded field - through space, time and movement - and the electronic space of new media, wherein these parameters collapse and the body becomes redundant.

© Kirsten Rann, Melbourne, Australia August 2007

related link: http://www.panatteri.net/