He Spoke To The Birds
FanFlus and AAlE Center for Contemporary Art are pleased to present He Spoke To The Birds, a three-artist exhibition curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan, featuring Jeremias Rumpl, Diego Azzola, and Huang Zhe. The exhibition takes its title from Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's account of Saint Francis of Assisi-"il parlait même aux oiseaux" ("he even spoke to the birds"). [1] The phrase evokes a foundational ethos of Arte Povera: a world in which human and nonhuman, all of creation, exist on the same level, where man is identified with nature. Art returned to its most elemental condition, foregrounding the inherent energy and language of materials. This sensibility persists in their practices: corroded zinc, galvanized pipes, and lingering smoke.
Jeremias Rumpl works with zine plates, transferring images from his sketchbooks onto their surfaces before subjecting the metal to acid etching, welding, and weathering to induce corrosion. This rust is the result of acid reacting with zinc, the material's own faithful inscription of its existence. The material completes what the image alone cannot: a double narrative emerges, as depictions of ruins and decay mirror the corrosion of the zine plates themselves-time is not only represented, but inscribed in the object.
Diego Azzola's installations are rooted in the elemental. Galvanized pipes invoke the logic of Roman aqueducts, systems that once carried the lifeblood of the city, now displaced from function and set in dialogue with figurative painting. Attuned to estrangement from nature and open to the potential of new materials, Azzola stages the organic alongside the industrial, the fluid alongside the fixed. His sustained attention to aquatic and marine worlds points to a primal vitality: matter as a site where lost nature resurfaces, where life takes form and energy circulates.
Smoke saturates the memory space Huang Zhe builds on linen. The recurring forms stem from his childhood in a Buddhist household in southern China, where incense and its drifting haze shaped the texture of everyday life. Smoke, in his work, is a residue of perception, linking figure, time, and absence, permeating and dispersing across the canvas. As the lightest and least graspable of materials, it becomes an emotional filter, transposing latent sensory experience into the present of painting and releasing contingency, the drift of microemotions.
Presented in Rome, a city sedimented in layers of stone, ruin, and water, this exhibition converses with Arte Povera: not to add ideas to things, but to discover what is already there-contingency, the flux of energy, a subjectivity renewed through contact with matter. To speak to the birds is to believe every creature has a voice worth heeding. Three artists work from the same faith, that zinc, pipes, and smoke are not instruments of expression, but interlocutors. Corroding, remembering, drifting, and dissolving, each releases the latent energy already held within the world. For the birds were never the only ones to be heard.
[1] Wychowanok, Thibaut. "Les chefs-d'œuvre de l'Arte povera s'exposent à la Bourse de commerce." Numéro, October 10, 2024.
[text by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan]
