Trent, Italy
Civica, the Trent branch of MART, Italy’s lauded contemporary art museum, ingeniously structured Stefano Cagol’s mid-career retrospective into a cycle that evoked the return of the native son to the site of his first exhibition. Beginning with an early self-portrait (1998) compounded into four states of motion, the show traced the paradigm shift that characterizes two decades of Cagol’s work. Unity through duality is a chief preoccupation, from early video experiments to September 11 (2009), an LED of memorial events on his birthday. In Cagol’s struggle to define a new medium through its origins in television, we arrive at a 1995 installation that flashes the words “The new God” through the scrambled signals of a TV set. Having defined the goal, we enter dual visions captured in Berlin, the icon of division unified…see the entire review in the print version of November’s Sculpture magazine.
