Hilario Isola
10 March - 1 June 2016
pictures 
Guido Costa Projects is pleased to host the first solo show of work in its gallery by the artist Hilario Isola. The exhibition showcases three new pieces, each one part of larger more complex series dedicated to the relationship between face and individual, between subject and form, which the artist has explored from conceptually different perspectives.
Replete with meaning, they are at once individual and universal portraits, distilled in ethereal archetypes of celebrated thinkers from the past.
The nail-shaped gallery of micro-sculptures is dedicated to those philosophers, whose faces so often become icons. Their forms steer our thoughts and reflections towards ideas of what an individual is. The normally imposing figures of Socrates, Nietzsche and Augustine are now shrunken and barely recognizable, becoming little more than indistinct grains of silt in the perennial backwash of thought.
The second portrait on show breathes a similar lightness. Despite its shadowy nature it looms as authoritative as only sculpture can only to materialize like pure identity back to the beginnings of existence. It needs mankind and to be physically activated.
And finally, the third face is a grotesque mask inside an imaginary casket. It belongs to the series Aruspici. Here abstraction of the face congeals into a kind of primordial matter that lives and proliferates – such are vines and their remains.
Apparently of nothing, the artworks by Hilario Isola in this exhibition are instead dense with thought-provoking ideas and prompts for narratives, a small sample of conceptually poetic sculpture.
The entire project spans two other exhibitions, which will open in Rome and Marrakesh almost simultaneously with the one in Turin. An artist’s book documenting the part dedicated to the portraits of philosophers will be presented on the opening night of the Turin exhibition.
The exhibition will remain open to the public during gallery opening times until 4 June 2016.
We would like to thank the Valentina Bonomo Gallery in Rome and Voice Gallery in Marrakech for their help with this project.
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Hilario Isola (Turin, 1976) lives and works in Turin. In 2015 and 2016, he exhibited at Maxxi and at Macro in Rome, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebadeungo in Turin and at the VI Marrakech Biennale. As Isola e Norzi he exhibited at NMNM in Monaco, at the Artists Space, at the Sculpture Centre and at Art in General in New York; at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice; at the Museion in Bolzano and, in Turin, at the GAM and at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation. This is the artist’s first solo show in the Guido Costa Projects gallery.