Canemorto Fish Market
Solo exhibition, 2024
MATTA - Gratin
New York (US)
Solo exhibition, 2024
MATTA - Gratin
New York (US)
CANEMORTO represents a unique case of creative cooperation. Behind a single name lie three artists who think and act as a single three-headed creature. Since high school—where they met more than fifteen years ago—their complicity has gradually evolved into a working method that allows them to collaborate on the conception and execution of every single work.
This is a decidedly unconventional partnership in a world that tends to assign roles and titles, where the focus is on identifying, distinguishing, and rewarding uniqueness and individual merit. A world that, by publicizing the lineup behind groups, systems, ideas, or enterprises, seeks to make the scope of projects and ambitions appear more solid and credible. In contrast, individuality, identifiability, or credibility are like smoke in the eyes for CANEMORTO—a trio that prefers to remain anonymous and act in secrecy, free to mix the credible and the unacceptable, obedience and disobedience, planning and improvisation. […]
Their tag remains the same as the one they chose back in 2007. As does their determination to remain anonymous and to hide their faces with balaclavas during performances, talks, or other public appearances. The trio's rules are well-established—applied and shared for years full-time—turning them into the foundation of an art-making practice entirely on their own terms: a liminal, clandestine, and mocking way of intervening and interfering, confronting and opposing. Confronting the system and confronting themselves. […]
Eclecticism and cross-disciplinary exploration are nothing new in art. But what makes CANEMORTO’s modus operandi both hilarious and subversive is unmistakably contemporary. It’s a way of blending knowledge and flavor that implicates us all, shrinking and ridiculing myths or value hierarchies. Confronting us with both urban outskirts and high finance, and breaking the lines between conditioning and unconditional freedom, between consumerism and imaginative expropriations. If art—from the Mayans to the 20th century—has changed society, its audiences, and ways of thinking, seeing, and living through nonconformist and often shocking choices, CANEMORTO certainly embraces this tradition of daring and visionary madness, turning it into an oeuvre that becomes a spin-off of the existing and once-existed—a brilliant narrative convolution. […]
I remember the moment the three of them first told me about Canemorto Fish Market: I was instantly enthusiastic, curious, and full of expectations. […] Art in a fish market certainly didn’t disappoint—on the contrary! I’d say it brushed the unthinkable, with faithful reconstructions down to the smallest detail: the shop furnishings and retail layout, rubber aprons and branded wrappers, the numbered line for purchases and the cash register. […] Open for just three days, their fish shop tested the public with cones of fried drawings, drawing tartares, live, dried, frozen, descaled, filleted drawings and more—hitting directly at the consumerist demon inside the audience, which, however, didn’t walk away. Shopping became a game, as it often does in CANEMORTO’s installations. […]
This is the kind of art I love—the kind that makes you think, shakes your certainties, and becomes guerrilla action. Even more so when the conspiracy comes with its own context, its own presentation, and a cathartic form of theatricality. And—what do you know!—even makes you laugh.
Mariuccia Casadio
TRAILER
Photographs by Nicola Antonazzo
This is a decidedly unconventional partnership in a world that tends to assign roles and titles, where the focus is on identifying, distinguishing, and rewarding uniqueness and individual merit. A world that, by publicizing the lineup behind groups, systems, ideas, or enterprises, seeks to make the scope of projects and ambitions appear more solid and credible. In contrast, individuality, identifiability, or credibility are like smoke in the eyes for CANEMORTO—a trio that prefers to remain anonymous and act in secrecy, free to mix the credible and the unacceptable, obedience and disobedience, planning and improvisation. […]
Their tag remains the same as the one they chose back in 2007. As does their determination to remain anonymous and to hide their faces with balaclavas during performances, talks, or other public appearances. The trio's rules are well-established—applied and shared for years full-time—turning them into the foundation of an art-making practice entirely on their own terms: a liminal, clandestine, and mocking way of intervening and interfering, confronting and opposing. Confronting the system and confronting themselves. […]
Eclecticism and cross-disciplinary exploration are nothing new in art. But what makes CANEMORTO’s modus operandi both hilarious and subversive is unmistakably contemporary. It’s a way of blending knowledge and flavor that implicates us all, shrinking and ridiculing myths or value hierarchies. Confronting us with both urban outskirts and high finance, and breaking the lines between conditioning and unconditional freedom, between consumerism and imaginative expropriations. If art—from the Mayans to the 20th century—has changed society, its audiences, and ways of thinking, seeing, and living through nonconformist and often shocking choices, CANEMORTO certainly embraces this tradition of daring and visionary madness, turning it into an oeuvre that becomes a spin-off of the existing and once-existed—a brilliant narrative convolution. […]
I remember the moment the three of them first told me about Canemorto Fish Market: I was instantly enthusiastic, curious, and full of expectations. […] Art in a fish market certainly didn’t disappoint—on the contrary! I’d say it brushed the unthinkable, with faithful reconstructions down to the smallest detail: the shop furnishings and retail layout, rubber aprons and branded wrappers, the numbered line for purchases and the cash register. […] Open for just three days, their fish shop tested the public with cones of fried drawings, drawing tartares, live, dried, frozen, descaled, filleted drawings and more—hitting directly at the consumerist demon inside the audience, which, however, didn’t walk away. Shopping became a game, as it often does in CANEMORTO’s installations. […]
This is the kind of art I love—the kind that makes you think, shakes your certainties, and becomes guerrilla action. Even more so when the conspiracy comes with its own context, its own presentation, and a cathartic form of theatricality. And—what do you know!—even makes you laugh.
Mariuccia Casadio
TRAILER
Photographs by Nicola Antonazzo
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