ROBERT JANITZ
CARMINA BURRATA

SAN CARLO, CREMONA, ITALY
24 SEPTEMBER 2022 – 25 JANUARY 2023

San Carlo Cremona is pleased to present Robert Janitz, “Carmina Burrata”, the fourth show of San Carlo Cremona to be held in the 17th-century deconsecrated church of San Carlo in Via Bissolati 33, Cremona. Robert Janitz’s solo show will be on view from September the 24th 2022 to January the 10th 2023. For the first year of the project San Carlo Cremona (September 2021 - September 2022) the artist Servane Mary has invited artists friends to exhibit in the space of San Carlo Cremona. Each exhibition is a site- specific solo presentation of an artist’s work that features various media. Initiating the series with painting: Servane Mary, “Glitches”; following with sculpture: Mark Handforth, “White-Light-Whirlwind”, and video-art and performance: Dara Friedman, “The Tiger’s Tail”; ends now with Robert Janitz’s painting in “Carmina Burrata”. Robert Janitz grounds his installation on a question that he keeps asking himself: what is the standard exhibition space called the “white cube” and what does it do to its content? Is it a neutral space? A commercial space? Or can it also be a sacred space? Janitz started investigating the “white cube” in 2021 at Luis Barragan’s modernist jewel Casa Gilardi. Six months later the question was again reiterated at Villa Ipranosyan, a beautiful decorated 19th century villa in Istanbul, and this past summer 2022 in Diego Rivera’s pseudo pre-columbian Museo Anahuacalli.

His new exhibition is here in Italy within another historic given: the Baroque church of San Carlo in Cremona. Where Casa Gilardi is about the “colored cube”, the Museo Anahuacalli shapes its black lava rock to form false Mayan arches, which are based on the diagonal. In the church of San Carlo, instead, it is all about the rounded arches of the side chapels and the vaulted ceilings, covered with frescoes deteriorated over time. “If one can postulate that a wall has two sides, one must assume a painting only has one” affirms Robert Janitz. The nave of the church will be traversed diagonally by a wall, separating the volume in two sides. The temporary wall’s arches mirror the architecture of the church, remind of a railroad bridge, an aqueduct. One side has six black and white paintings and the other side houses six full of colors paintings. One can navigate back and forth, walk and weave from one side to the other. Janitz leaves it open to viewers if they can “read” the paintings, or maybe can not. The artist’s intervention in the space operates as a device to structure the passing of time and images and the meanings attached to it creating a reference to “The Art of Memory” by Frances Yates. “Carmina Burrata", the title of the exhibition at San Carlo, irreverently paraphrases the title of the Carmina Burana, an irreverent medieval poetry collection, and points to the Burrata as a universally recognizable globe-shaped cheese product, found in both the old and the new world - “if you are what you eat, maybe there is hope to understand each other”, states the artist.