Alfonso Artiaco gallery is delighted to announce the opening of the Anne and Patrick Poirier’s first solo show in Naples on December 14th at 7.30 p.m., with the artists' present.

Anne and Patrick Poirier were born both in 1942, she is architect and he is archaeologist. They’ve worked together since the 60’s. Their artistic union officially began in 1968, during their roman stay at Villa Medici, when they won the Grand Prix de Rome. They realize sculptures, photography, artistic books, and installations…

Right from the start their work is centred in their interest for Memory, being it individual or collective, its traces, its mechanisms. Little by little, by trial and subsequent research projects, they have tried to search and build this Memory, to understand this mysterious function. 

Throughout the years, Anne and Patrick Poirier have used different visual and spatial metaphors in order to make themselves a picture of the structure of “Memoria”, which Sigmund Freud himself, trying to give an image of it, compared to a town in ruins, more precisely to ancient Rome.

Anne and Patrick Poirier have developed a passion for archaeology and for towns in ruins, because they perceive without being able to explain it clearly, the close relationship between archaeology and memory, memory and identity, memory and Psyche. 

At the Alfonso Artiaco gallery are showed: two tiny landscapes buried at the bottom of two cranial caps, titled “Pozzuoli”. They represent a memory of the artists’ stay in that city; a big glass-structure at the centre of the gallery, the “ Memory’s Labyrinth”, takes up the elliptical brain form. This structure, constituted by mirror panels with words and sentences, “ Memory’s Labyrinth” suggests to the spectator thoughts and echoes, becoming like a interior room, which evokes the endless work of the memory itself that forgets and takes care. Also photos of several objects are exposed: such as the ones of the flowers that Anne and Patrick Poirier have found during the course of their daily walks and the ones of 20.000.000 years before Christ’s uncontaminated landscapes.