East, London
Group Exhibition
Ritornellos
Nicoletti ContemporaryKevin Beasley Mohamed Bourouissa Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom Devin B. Johnson Nicoletti is delighted to present Ritornellos, a group exhibition. Ritornellos takes the concept of the musical refrain as a point of departure to explore contemporary manifestations of assemblage in painting, sculpture and sound, presenting artworks that combine not only a diversity of materials but also a multiplicity of narratives, cultures and histories. The idea of using a musical term to reflect upon the notion of assemblage is inspired by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari's chapter on the ‘Ritournelle’ in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Designating a recurrent instrumental section interspersed with rhythmical variations and contrasting episodes, the ritornello – ‘little return’ in Italian, commonly called ‘refrain’ in English – became a term employed by Deleuze & Guattari to describe the ‘logic of multiplicities’ underlying any formation of an assemblage – whether individual (the atoms and organs composing a body, as well as the diverse characteristics forming an identity), collective (the formation of cities, communities and territories), or artistic (e.g. a painting made with an array of lines, textures and colours; a sculptural composition made of multiple materials and fragments; or a melody in which converge a diversity of sounds, movements and counterpoints). Challenging notions of unity and linearity, the artists in Ritornellos consider the multitude of rhythms – periodic, circadian, liturgical – that define territories and the relations between the beings living in them – a process identified by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), in which she thinks about the environment as a series of polyphonic assemblages in which ‘autonomous melodies intertwine’. Through techniques of fragmentation, accumulation and conflation of materials, as well as the layering of apparently disparate stories and references, the artworks in Ritornellos invite us to question the notions of unity and linearity, providing instead a perception of history and geography as the result of open-ended gatherings between heterogeneous elements and processes. "The refrain is a prism, a crystal of space-time. It acts upon that which surrounds it, sound or light, extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions, projections, or transformations. The refrain also has a catalytic function: not only to increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that which surrounds it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity, and thereby to form organised masses." —Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari [1] Ritornellos is developed in collaboration with Pantograph, an art management and advisory company based in the US and founded in 2022 by Nick Murphy and Rosey Selig-Addiss. 1 - Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, ‘1837: Of the Refrain’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II (1980), trans. Brian Massumi, (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 348.