Andrea Crosa. Music For Silent Radios

Starting from October 29th 2014, the rooms of the cultural association MADE are hosting SILENT MUSIC FOR RADIOS, an installation by Andrea Crosa.
Through his works, the artist ponders upon his life and the time when it all began. We can only imagine what would have happened, what would have changed and what roads would have been taken by the artist, had he not lived in those places in Argentina, had he not had those encounters, those adventures, those friends; had he not seen and loved cars, had he not seen and loved beautiful and motherly women.
Memory, the leitmotiv of the exhibition, peeks out of the walls of the Turin gallery MADE FOR LOVE, switching on in the beholder an automatic shift in a parallel world. It’s the world of the fifties and its liberating pleasure regarding consumerism, its objects, worshipped, desired and selected totems. Seemingly innocuous, these small representations, benevolent thumbnails, little images, “madeleine” — radios for the most part, but also an authentic Studebaker coming out of a pretty house, a Lilliputian swimming pool — take you far away in time and, suddenly evocative, recall of a time when there was a beginning of something: a friendship, an attraction, a curiosity.
Andrea Crosa tells about himself as a child, light and tender, like Tweety the canary with the ambition to be Sylvester, remembering the discovery of women, of friendship, of beauty, of speed, of the unusual taste of a pate. He does so through the senses, with the aid of images that, being cut out and isolated from context or three-dimensional like pretty toys, recall the time of childhood with its suitable set of fragrances evoking life experiences, with its sounds, roaring or melodious, the excited buzzes, the rumble of engines, with the food “exchanged” with that special friend.
No statements, groups or determinations are required: the visitor is accompanied by the flow of life. Memory becomes some sort of repertoire, a catalogue, a collection of tools, toy cars, pale blue and pink perhaps, of playmates, of women, beautiful like actresses, chosen as a possibility, a starting point from where each one can then move in a more suitable direction.
Andrea Crosa comes very close to the temptation to give in to the dictates of nostalgia, as if the artist would perceive the flattery of memory and emotion, which doesn’t rise from practice, but from remembrance: to remain a child artist forever is a commitment which requires an attitude, a resource of gradually evolving the specific ability to find consciousness in things, even the ones that do not belong to us anymore.
In the rooms of MADE FOR LOVE the exhibition Music for silent radios, proposes a range of images that are the source, the humus of Crosa’s creative soil. Only seemingly incidental, they contain the real reasons for putting memory back into play: the mute radios speak to those who know how to listen. Every object, every single figure in this exhibition dedicated to childhood, produces music, because childhood is the time when perfumes, attitudes, images, take the upper hand in us and then become transformed into life projects.
The radio household appliance becomes the story, its presence can decide the course of the narration, what will we hear when it’s turned on? A siren, the start of the news report or the soothing music that makes us indulge in the pleasure of listening? How do we relate to an item so harmless and reassuring? With the right curiosity and openness, through traces that couldn’t and cannot be erased, we expect to hear a signal that allows us to remember.

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