San Carlo Cremona is pleased to announce Robert Janitz with “Carmina Burrata,” the fourth exhibition of the San Carlo project hosted inside the deconsecrated 17th-century church of San Carlo at Via Bissolati 33 in Cremona. For the first year of the San Carlo Cremona project (September 2021 – September 2022), New York-based artist Servane Mary invited artist friends to exhibit in the Cremonese space. Each exhibition in this program was a site-specific solo presentation of an artist’s work across different media. The series began with painting: Servane Mary, “Glitches”; continued with sculpture: Mark Handforth, “White-Light-Whirlwind”; video art and performance: Dara Friedman, “The Tiger’s Tail”; and now concludes with painting by Robert Janitz in “Carmina Burrata.”

Robert Janitz bases his installation on a question he continually asks himself: what is the standard exhibition space known as the "white cube," and what does it do to its "content"? Is it a neutral space? A commercial space? Or can it also be a sacred space? Robert Janitz began investigating the "white cube" in 2021 at Casa Gilardi, Luis Barragán’s modernist jewel. Six months later, the question was raised again at Villa Ipranosyan in Istanbul, a wonderful decorated 19th-century mansion, and again in early summer 2022 at Diego Rivera’s pseudo-Pre-Columbian Anahuacalli Museum.

His new exhibition in Italy finds another historical grounding: the Baroque church of San Carlo in Cremona. While Casa Gilardi represents the "colored cube," the Anahuacalli Museum shaped its black volcanic rock to achieve false Mayan arches based on the diagonal. In the church of San Carlo, however, everything revolves around the arches of the side chapels and vaulted ceilings, all decorated with frescoes weathered by time. “If it can be postulated that a wall has two sides, one must assume that a painting has only one,” states Robert Janitz. The church's nave is crossed diagonally by a wall, which divides the space into two sides. The arches of this temporary wall mirror the architecture of the church, recalling a railway bridge or an aqueduct. One side features six black-and-white paintings, while the other side accommodates highly colorful works. Visitors can walk back and forth, weaving a connection between one side of the wall and the other. Janitz leaves the viewer free to "read" the works or not. The artist’s intervention in the space—a reference to Frances Yates’ book The Art of Memory—functions as a means to structure the passage of time and the images and meanings associated with it.

“Carmina Burrata,” the title of the exhibition at San Carlo, irreverently paraphrases the equally irreverent collection of medieval poems Carmina Burana, pointing to Burrata as a universally recognizable, globe-shaped product present in both the Old and New World—“if you are what you eat, perhaps there is hope of understanding each other,” says the artist.