48
Auckland
Gui Taccetti Inferno
Hopetoun Alpha, 17–21 July
KRISELLE BAKER
Gui Taccetti’s background as an art
director and set designer is evident
throughout his richly staged images.
Behind the cultivated beauty of
the photographs are the more
philosophical elements of his practice.
In this exhibition, Inferno, the first after
his graduate show from Elam School of
Fine Arts in 2017, he focuses on what
it means to be gay in a contemporary
world. In doing so he has achieved
something extraordinarily moving.
Dante Alighieri’s Inferno is the
first part of his epic poem the Divine
Comedy in which the poet travels
into the underworld witnessing the
torture of those trapped within a Hellmade up of nine concentric circles. As
he moves deeper into the abyss the
ordeals of the condemned increase
as each is punished according to his
crime. Finally Dante reaches the frozen
expanse in which the most egregious
of sinners are found locked in ice with
Satan. While Taccetti’s works do not
explicitly replicate Dante’s journey,
the outcome they both hope to attain
is similar: acceptance into a more
peaceful, loving world.
A dinner held in the exhibition
space was reminiscent of the 1989
Peter Greenaway movie The Cook, the
Thief, His Wife and Her Lover—not the
violence of the movie but the sexual
elements, the torment and of course
the staging of the dinner. A long table
stretching the length of the gallery
waselaboratelylaidfor 40 diners(above) GUI TACCETTI Viado (Deer) 2019
Pigment inks on Hahnemühle Photo Rag®
Baryta, size variable
(left) The façade of Hopetoun Alpha during
the run of Gui Taccetti’s Inferno
(Photograph: Alex North)
(opposite above) Gui Taccetti’s Inferno at
Hopetoun Alpha, July 2019
(Photograph: Sam Hartnett)
(opposite below) GUI TACCETTI
Misericórdia (Mercy) 2019
Pigment inks on Hahnemühle Photo Rag®
Baryta, size variable