Let it Shine

Department store la Rinascente celebrates Christmas 2015 with an artistic installation created ad hoc by John Armleder to animate its historic windows overlooking Piazza Duomo in Milan.

The Swiss artist has been commissioned to design and realise a site-specific work of art with strong visual impact and conceptual influence based on a project curated by Cloe Piccoli. John Armleder has tackled the Christmas theme many times. His Christmas Parties are incredibly well known. These are fabulous Christmas events that have been held in Geneva for many years bringing together acclaimed personages from the international art scene. Fantastic compilations of Christmas music created in collaboration with his record label Villa Magica Record – founded with Silvie Fleury and his son Stéphane in 2003 – are the soundtrack to these events. Christmas, as a collective celebration and ceremony par excellence in which each and every perception is amplified into a vertiginous diapason of emotions and rituals, has always been a source of inspiration for the artist. And it’s here, in this context that slides along the fine line between art and life, reality and fiction, kitsch and history of art, that the creative heart of John Armleder’s works can be collocated: cultured, lucid and ironic.

Leading figure of some of the most radical and experimental artistic movements in the 60s – from Fluxus, of which he was among the most fascinating promoters, to Groupe Ecart, which he founded in Geneva – John Armleder has created performances, installations, environments and paintings such as the Pour Paintings and his highly celebrated Furniture Sculptures. His approach relates to Situationism. His work is a process. His languages are multiple. The aim is to create experiences and contexts in which narratives, languages, inspirations, Fluxus spirit and abstract painting, readymades and sculpture, performances and installations are all brought together.

This is the setting in which the artist will create for the Christmas windows of la Rinascente Let it Shine, Let it Shine, Let it Shine. It’s Xmas again!, a comprehensive work of art in which different media complement each other: painting, installation and music. The public becomes an integral part of the work, projecting their own shadow into the installation itself and virtually going through it as if sharing only one space in which art and life intertwine and overlap each other.

The famous, captivating Pour Paintings – large painted and textured canvases – interact with sparkling Christmas decorations in a magical interplay of chromatic reflections and brilliance. The work of art reflects on decoration and abstraction, art and consumerism, on the role of the artist as an “author” in the noble lineage of the most intense conceptual and Situationist practice that runs from Warhol to Fluxus and John Cage. But Let it Shine, Let it Shine, Let it Shine. It’s Xmas again! also establishes a relationship with the architecture of the historic building of Piazza Duomo and with the urban dimension of the city. A team of young curators and artists from the Brera Fine Arts Academy will be available to explain the history of the installation in the windows. A video showing the making-of the work of art will be made with the active collaboration of the artist. This is an additional narrative element that communicates the visual complexity and intensity of a work that la Rinascente is proud to offer as a magnificent Christmas gift to the city of Milan.

until 3 January 2016
Let it Shine, Let it Shine, Let it Shine. It’s Xmas again!
la Rinascente
Piazza Duomo, Milan