Hyperrealism, interactivity, surrealism, social experimentation. All of this is Mark Jenkins. Class of 1970, this prominent contemporary artist loves to put to a test our ideas about reality and normality with his daring work. Exhibited all over the world, from the United States to Japan, Jenkins articulates political and social issues in his art. Pop culture has a lot of importance to him, three years ago he took part in two of the most important events in Europe: the Nuit blanche in Paris and the Glastonbury Festival.
Rero, instead, younger than thirteen, revives the splendor of the graffiti art – his art is entirely verbal: short, surprising messages left in exposed or hidden places. His signature is omnipresent: a black bar that cuts the fonts. He uses materials foreign to art in order to re-elaborate them artistically. He reflects on the self-censorship and contradictions which fill our society.
Now, after two personal exhibitions in Rome, the two artists unite in Milan in the framework of Wunderkammern. Their audacious and ambiguous collaboration is titled Rules of Engagement. The literal meaning concerns both “Rules of Engagement” of the military, which establish the rules of deployment of troops in the battlefield, and rules of engagement in a marriage, with the desired division between the closeness of love and the distance of war. Through these rules, our emotions are more and more defined, crystallized and formalized. The project of Jenkins and Rero is a study of this phenomenon, done through mixed technique works and installations created à deux.
The exhibition will be open to the public from Wednesday, September 20th at the Wunderkammern gallery, in a space suited for such events like no other, always aiming to explore the new frontiers of relational art, the art that has as its starting point the aggregate of human relationships and their social context, with particular attention to what connects the interior to the exterior, the normal to the paradoxical, and the normal to the outrageous.