It investigates the time of man and the time of nature the project that Denis Riva has designed specifically for Forte Larino, articulated through works made specifically and other recent ones, ranging from small to large formats, and which make use of different means of expression, from design to installation, to video. Last year, a scientific study, published in the journal "Science", showed, for the first time, that our perception of time is different from that of animals, according to an experiment conducted by Joe Paton on laboratory mice, which identified the neural circuits that modulate this feeling.
Denis Riva has been working for a long time on the temporal dimension triggered by the contact with nature and to the fort he brings some of his last "Pastors on Wool". It is a reflection on a very ancient tradition of animal farming Eurasia and, in particular, on that of sheep, which moves on temporal space trajectories totally apart from the usual flow of everyday life thus becoming for antonomasia a metaphor for waiting.
This state of observation of the natural world is also at the basis of a series of drawings on paper dedicated to lake landscapes and, therefore, to a water that has slowed down its flow. Of immobility, this time inert, is permeated the pile of heads of wild animals that Riva puts into action evoking another atavistic practice of waiting in nature, that of hunting, a practice that can also be associated with another work: the video "L'è", in which one can distinguish, within the succession of drawings, a cluster of heads of dogs or wolves.
In turn, this thought calls to mind other high-altitude conflicts, given that the so-called White War, a static war marked by climatic and environmental difficulties, took place right on the high Dolomite mountains overlooking Forte Larino.
Even in the video work "Carpus Osco", realized well before being intended for viewing inside a fort, it seems now to see men soldiers, instead of simple men. In the succession of shades of gray we see scenes of violence: a man who crushes the skull of another man with his foot, limbs cut off, drops like blood splatters, a multitude bent, another multitude dominated by a man who puts his feet on their head, and a scene of mountains and a recognizable profile of a wolf, which stands on two legs like a man, as if nature could no longer stand and watch.
Denis Riva was born in Cento (Ferrara) in 1979. He lives and works in Follina (Treviso).
Mariella Rossi
