Francesco Cagnin

Antiwiseclock
July 31, 2022 – September 24, 2022

Like anticlockwise.

Like counterclockwise. 

So begins the premise of the piece: the slippage of language, muchless the translation, and it’s (in)direct meaning. As it stands, counterclockwise is the specific American English term to anticlockwise, the British English term. How do you say it and what does it say about you? 

Of course, it doesn’t matter anyway—Francesco Cagnin will rework it. 

Although educated in the conceptual and historical aspects of artistic production at university, an earlier, brief training in graphic design led him to rebel against capitalist endeavors of marketing. He was, however, still captivated by the break down of a person’s attention span or immediacy of an advertisement’s campaign. In essence, an interest in the fundamental examination of the natural desire to destill something into a singular word or form, which is a repeated action throughout Cagnin’s work. 

In Antiwiseclock, minimal gestures are similarly offered to an audience in order to grasp onto meaning that is compacted by so much play and projection. Like a riddle, the few sparing things to extract a narrative is ultimately combined with heavy symbology that complicates it. We’re given the enigmatic elements: the word tutti, Italian for ‘everyone,’ obscurely wraps around an image of the world, screenprinted in rotation 33 times onto a sequence of mirrors that align the perimeter of The Lighthouse, under the vessel of a reorganized English title meant to mean a reversal of time. If it was a poem, it would be a haiku; a harmonious balance of form and interpretation. It is up to one’s own senses to define it, in as much as it is ultimately your reflection within the repeated mirrored object. 

Born in 1988 outside of Venice, Italy, Francesco Cagnin moved to Switzerland in 2014 to further his studies at ECAL in Lausanne, followed by the SOMA residency program in Mexico City and the Stiftung Sitterwerk residency in St. Gallen. He has shown widely throughout Europe, including Fondation Ricard in Paris, Shoefrog in Vienna, Kunsthalle Zurich, Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, 16 Quadriennale in Roma, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venezia. Cagnin lives and works in Zurich.

Text by Brit Barton