The eccentric design duo behind Toiletpaper magazine has set its sights on the Med with a multi-venue installation in Italian city Rimini.
Italian artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, cofounders of the brilliantly bizarre Toiletpaper magazine, have made the North Italian city of Rimini into a gallery space with an exhibition of their work Saluti da Rimini. The public show consists of billboards of the collaborators’ work curated by Maria Cristina Didero and erected around the city in historically and culturally significant venues.
The images have been pulled from Cattelan and Ferrari’s archives: eight previously unseen photos that display their trademark stock image aesthetic. The photos have a flat, dimensionless quality that is offset by their surreal depth: a naked bum, outlined in toothpaste; a man behind bars of sausages
The images take on the guise of postcards with a nostalgic, Seventies-nostalgic font plastered across them: Greetings from Rimini. Now why would you send greetings from Rimini, to Rimini? Why not, Cattelan and Ferrari implicitly retort.
Postcards are essentially images of a place’s most obvious associations, and this set are no different in displaying the glossy best angles of Rimini. Cattelan and Ferrari present images that are synonymous with the Fellini-esque Italian holiday destination: sex, cars, beverages and people covered in food. But the images are subverted beyond the ordinary, and rather than familiar they are funny and unsettling.
These colour-saturated snapshots of Rimini present a visual distillation of a cultural trope. This is your Italian summer holiday as you’ve never before seen it.
Saluti da Rimini
Until 30 September 2015
Rimini, Italy
comune.rimini.it
toiletpapermagazine.org
