"Do you know," he had asked her, "how rare the element Astatine 215 is? Imagine taking the crust of the Earth that makes up North and South America, digging down ten kilometres deep, then sifting everything you found, atom by atom, looking for Astatine 215. Do you know how many atoms you would find?" His wife didn't know.
"Practically none," answered Asimov, "Only a trillion."
In his latest show at Studio Guenzani, open until the end of November, Matteo Rubbi does something similar to what Asimov suggested to his wife. Instead of the surface of the Earth, he sifts daily life, random objects and school-time memories through a very fine sieve looking for traces of science. And he found them.
The public enters the art gallery by a room furnished with the most stereotypical elements of contemporary art: a series of little lights, a monochrome screen, and an electronic sound emitted rhythmically. Immediately one thinks of the number of artists from the past (Félix González-Torres is one) who have created similar work. But strictly speaking, Rubbi's furnishings are not artwork, but more like forensic snapshots, biographies or pictures of chemical elements.
Rubbi's project is evident in the next room, which contains an indescribable quantity of things: balloons wafting up to the ceiling, a bucket smelling of swimming pools, light bulbs, baseball bats, 19th-century cameos, metal bars, a photocopy machine, coins, bits and pieces. The objects are arranged in an order that oscillates between the rigour of an ethnographic museum and the messiness of an artist's studio: lined up in rows on overcrowded tables or in display cases, or tossed on the floor in a haphazardly way that is obviously not so haphazard.
A good look around allows one to perceive the common nature of these objects: the elements, the natural elements of which we find traces all around us, in the surface of things that are part of our life. There is the Phosphorus of glow-in-the-dark, the Magnesium of the photographic flash, the Tungsten of incandescent light bulb filaments, the Chlorine of pools. Then there are super-secret giants such as Thorium, Dysprosium and Lanthanum.
On the rear wall, two blackboards illustrate the birth of the universe with colourful drawings. A basket-ball at the gallery's entrance is the centre of a scale model of the solar system, dispersed throughout the city. Mercury is in the courtyard – an almost invisible nail. Saturn is a ping-pong ball several kilometres away. Like the selection of objects in the show, this is a scientific model of the world, but the science that inspires it is at once imaginary and ordinary: the science of illustrated books, sketches by parents on the napkin of a pizzeria, the science of missiles heading out into space.
The exhibition includes a booklet containing make-believe biographies or impossible stories about the nature of each of the 92 elements, written by Rubbi as a guide to find direction, or lose himself, in his exploration. Indeed, without a guide, it's easy to get lost in the show. It feels like being in a scientific laboratory that has been abandoned in a hurry for fear of a catastrophe, or in a classroom during a teachers strike, or in a clandestinely inhabited museum. Only the fugitive scientist, the absent professor or the hidden inhabitant are missing, but needed to supply the key to the objects and their connection to the periodic table of the elements. As you squintingly study the booklet, a flash of green light suddenly illuminates you, accompanied by the whistle of a firework. The colour, of course, is determined by the fact that it is filled with Boron.
Vincenzo Latronico
