• Jan De Cock

Everything for You, Torino

Is it still possible today for art to exist outside of the rules and demands of the market? Can it still be the object of contemplation, without its beauty and value being tied to capitalistic necessities? Why we don’t do munuments anymore? With Everything for You, Belgian artist Jan De Cock gives his response to these questions by proposing a new way of experiencing art: Sculpturecommunism.

From the land of the great Flemish tradition, the basis of Jan De Cock’s training, his avant-garde movement advances through the world, insinuating itself into a system in order to dismantle its foundations. From the BAI (Brusselles Art Institute), the driving force of his idea of art, the sculptures move on to other cities and countries, representatives of a new future for art: a future in which galleries no longer follow the trends of a stalled market, and critics no longer replace artists, promoted by defunct institutions and academies. In Jan De Cock’s tomorrow, art is free again.

Everything for You is a project in defense of everything that cannot find an immediate positioning in the market, in antithesis to the direction in which the culture industry is moving: profit before beauty, the work art turned fetish. Jan De Cock subverts a certain mode of reception that puts form and possession before emotion, reciprocity and exchange. The artist takes his sculptures out of the galleries, away from the institutions, and into the real world, among the people. The project finds its fulfillment in interactions with the public and in the chance encounters that occur throughout the city, in a return to contemplation.

Like modern Trojan horses, the pieces invade the city; they are placed along streets, around buildings and communicate with the surrounding environment, interacting with citizens. Art that becomes event, art outside the circuits of art, not only the physical circuits, but the mental ones too. Jan De Cock erases the traditional lines between the places of production, of viewing, of selling and of criticism, creating a new space in which roles and settings are radically reevaluated. It is public art, in the broadest, Pandean sense; it is art for everyone.

After Brussels, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Mexico City… Everything for you is coming to Italy. The artist has chosen Turin, with its nostalgic elegance and classicism, to be the stronghold from which to launch a new phase of his project: the creation of a foundation, a new center in which Sculpturecommunism can evolve and from which it can spread to new areas. In the artist’s vision, this city is a symbol of a certain way of making art, of values, and of a cultural legacy that is in danger of being lost.

In response to the minimalist, conceptual shows to which contemporary art has accustomed its public, Francesca Minini is presenting this one as a traditional exhibition. Artworks in marble, wood, and plaster inhabit the main room. On the walls one finds stereoscopic visions of Sculpturecommunist events in cities, almost like windows opened up onto the world, creating a connection: Models for a Monument for Giorgio De Chirico, outside of the white cube the sculptures are transformed into large-scale celebratory monuments. De Cock pays homage to classicism, through architecture made up of columns and arcades, of the same kind we find in De Chirico’s metaphysical town squares, De Chirico who was the father of modern Italian art, a link between past and present.

Turin versus Milan, then, the old capital of the Kingdom of Italy against its modern economic capital, the cathedral of that system of market and of art which De Cock calls into question. In the gallery, the artist makes use of the structure and dynamics of the capitalist system and appropriates them: from Sculpturecommunism to Abstract Capitalism, the market becomes the means with which to guarantee the project’s evolution, and continue to proclaim its message.