Nicolas Aiello

Notes on Notes (Damisch, Schapiro, Warburg)

Nicolas Aiello invents visual worlds through drawing, photography, video, and site-specific installations. Combining conceptual and processual approaches, he works with archival documents, everyday objects, or images collected while wandering throughout the city.

The installation created especially for the exhibition offers itself as a graphic reverie on the drawings and written traces left by art historians. Schapiro / Box 52 brings to mind the epidermis of a tattooed body, whose ornaments reveal Meyer Schapiro’s graphic analyses of Bruegel’s and Rubens’s paintings. Alongside it, Dear Meyer is the artistic metamorphosis of a letter that Hubert Damisch addressed to Schapiro, whose altered morphology unfolds an organic landscape punctuated by the mysterious course of a car racing down the hills of Ithaca on a summer day in 1972. Finally, After Warburg (Fragments on Expression) is the graphic translation of Aby Warburg's work, based on the miniature and obsessive rewriting of the art historian’s notes about the laws presiding over the formation of art (1888–1905).

The three works are part of a wall composition made of drawings taken from Damisch's notebooks and Schapiro's archives. Transformed into serial linguistic icons, these artistic journeys form an imaginary “text” where two lives dedicated to the analysis of art are intertwined, and reinvented in images.