Art Review: Lara Favaretto's Absolutely Nothing at Nottingham Contemporary

The current topic on the lips of art aficionados isn’t the recent sale of a 1982 Jean-Michel Basquiat for $110,500,000, with Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa the new and very careful owner of untitled. Already part of the dead at 27 club, Basquiat has now entered the rarefied air of the 9-digit club, alongside the exalted company of Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso, while still mixing with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison in a realm of more dubious distinction. 

Basquiat is now an art titan, and Maezawa has had another expensive day. But this is small beer, as what has captured the attention of our city's denizens is, as we can hardly avoid, that Nottingham Contemporary is on fire and has been for a while. While we wait for The New York Times and the rest to trip over themselves as they did when the Basquiat fetched a pile, let us assure them they've not missed an exclusive, and the building is, despite passers-by having called the increasingly weary fire brigade, still intact.

The steam rising from its roof is water vapour, so perfectly harmless. Nottingham fire-fighters can shake a fist at Lara Favaretto, for it is the Italian artist who has tricked concerned spectators. This piece, Thinking Head (2017), is the most visible of her exhibition Absolutely Nothing, a title tailor-made for Martin Creed. Upon entering her largest UK show to date, first to assert itself is the uncomfortable cold: not of her work – which is hardly inviting at first glance – but the building’s temperature, which is prone to misbehaving of its own accord. The cold is unsettling, and so pronounced it appears a supplementary device. Is Favaretto deliberately playing more games?

Well, it turns out the air-conditioning is on the blink, but this atmospheric accident brings to mind the calculation of that experienced in The Holocaust Tower in Daniel Liebskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin. An isolated splinter lacking air-conditioning, with daylight penetrating just a narrow slit in a chilly concrete silo many metres high, the effect is overwhelming: an aggressive stillness; a contrasting chill first pleasant, then foreboding; the desire to touch and stroke the sheer, smooth concrete walls, but to remain silent while moving slowly around, bemused as to how an absence of content provokes so much meaning. The space is a deliberate void, but the weight of the memory of the Holocaust, stifling all desire for anything but pause and reflection, fills it from sharp edge to jagged corner.

From promising little but delivering plenty, this space is a stately triumph, especially when endured with as few other people for company as possible. Its stark simplicity rather puts high-concept art in the shade, and a lot of contemporary work is stained by its reliance on tortured explication, rather than an initial resonance with the work on its own terms, or a presence Liebskind's building and Picasso's and Bacon's paintings have in spades. Favaretto straddles the divide between theory and realisation, with one flowing into another, rather than arguing between themselves. Taboo (2017) is nothing more than a kinetic sculpture comprising a pair of car-wash brushes, slabs of iron, a motor and some electrics. In turn, each brush is individually powered up and, as their bristles cascade outwards as their inertia is removed and contact with the iron established, they rub up against the alternately same sections of prone slabs. 

On and on they churn, like the blunt power of running water wearing down the obstacle of rock. As the rock must adopt a new shape by eventually relenting to its opponent’s force, so does the iron also yield: its surface is altered with the incessant rubbing up against of an objectively softer substance deforming its appearance. The degenerative process of patina is accelerated, with the iron shifting state at the whim of a foe it wouldn’t normally encounter. Here, the artist questions the authentic – as does Thinking Head – and evokes an uncertainty as to the natural cause and process of deterioration. A similar trick is played with Di Blasi R7 (2012). The scuffed, dirty facades of two gallery walls suggest an absence of effort by Nottingham Contemporary's cleaners, resulting in a pair of spaces whose own scruffy presentation must make an artist reluctant to have them frame their own work.

Unlike the temperature, this effect is intentional, with the inconsistent marks traces of a deliberate action, one the artist has deployed in earlier exhibitions. The title refers to the model of moped driven randomly around the gallery prior to installation, with riders encouraged to skim its walls depending on their level of confidence or recklessness, so purposefully leaving a residue mimicking the lines and rhythms of an action painting. As much as Favaretto invites us to question legitimacy, so too can we pose her this same objection. Through advocating the intangible and immaterial in her work and eroding the walls, she not only challenges a gallery’s architectural context, but consequently the legitimacy of that contained inside the dividing lines of a space she dismisses, by its soiling, as improper for accommodating art. Sadly then, the artist plays the most persuasive trick on herself.

Lara Favaretto's Absolutely Nothing runs at Nottingham Contemporary until Monday 28 August 2017

Nottingham Contemporary website