Six kinds of smoke

Greenwashing. Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities
Foundation Sandretto Re Rebaudango, Turin Feb-May

On Thursday night (28 Feb) Greenwashing. Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities opened in foggy, smoggy Turin. The European Union has recently warned that the city is consistently overstepping its smog and pollution limits in terms of days per year. Yet people are beginning to flock to this beautiful baroque city that was, until the winter Olympic Games, almost without tourists. I guess most of the art people arrived by plane. At the after-party in the city centre a bulbous cloud seeped and leaked up from a grill in the street and completely covered the people smoking outside the bar. Half fled and left the scene the rest sat there obliviously chatting in the late night. The explosion was in fact a spontaneous work by French artist Cyprien Gaillard using an industrial fire extinguisher. The impromptu gesture directly echoes his works in the exhibition which deal with “vandalized... graffiti-like,‘en plein air’ pollution clouds [that] redraw the landscape” and cite the conflict and disharmony in which the world began and thrives. In one clean moment maybe half the audience recognised it was a work.
Geoff Lowe