Filippo Minelli - Neoliberalistan

Filippo Minelli presents his third solo exhibition Neoliberalistan at Ruttkowski;68 in Cologne.

The artist never stays long in one place, his nomadic practice especially through the Middle East, draws him mainly to contested regions, to places that have experienced conflict or are still in the midst of it. Calm, reduced sceneries disguise the suffering and struggle that these places were once characterized by. In a howling of silence inscribed into the landscapes, the fleeting gap between reality and its representation becomes tangible.

A very close investigation of the physical places, learning, studying and analyzing its nature, its patterns and characteristics is digested in a variety of media, such as installation, sculpture, cgi and photography and processed within the aesthetics of construction sites, the provisional, the transitional state, often conveyed by zones of conflicts.

Wall filling paintings originated under the abstraction of globalized aesthetics of physical border zones, like between Portugal and Spain. The interaction between natural and anthropolocigal places, between the human and the landscape in which one is embedded, the behavior that emerges from and acts on it, shape, form and determine its narratives. Every new story reinvents the discrepancy between fact and fiction, creating new conditions and possibilities between peace and conflict, depicting these areas whose boundaries are blurred by the neoliberal system.