This is a guest post written by Howard Sullivan who together with Tom Phillipson make up the London based design agency Your Studio. You can see the original post on their blog.

“Underneath Day’s azure eyes, Ocean’s nursling, Venice lies, A peopled labyrinth of walls, Amphitrite’s destined halls.”

As the sun rose and the art-crowds flocked, the great palazzos threw open their doors this weekend marking the opening of Venice’s 53rd Biennale, curated by Daniel Burnbaum and open

Francis Upritchard’s ‘Yellow Dancer’ from ‘Save Yourself’, installation for the NZ Pavillion, Palazzo Mangilli-Valmarana, Venice Biennale, 2009

For the next four summer months. This showcase of the world’s best and most diverse art talent is the modern treasure within not only the amazing crumling palazzos but also at the ‘Arsenale’, a grand industrial L-shaped sequence of double-height brick warehouses and at ‘Giardini’- a large open park scattered with rambling pavilions and outbuildings.

We first encountered Francis Upritchard at Kate MacGarry’s Vyner Street Gallery for the show ‘Feierabend‘ with Martino Gamper and Karl Fritsch.  ‘Save Yourself‘, Upritchard’s show representing New Zealand at the Biennale at Palazzo Mangilli-Valmarana is both entrancing and unmissable.

Francis Upritchard’s ‘Save Yourself’ for the NZ Pavillion, Palazzo Mangilli-Valmarana, Venice Biennale, 2009

Entering the decayed splendour of the top floor rooms of the palace, you feel like you are aparty to something private, privileged to enter a kind of magical assembly. A bande of beautiful and intriguing miniature figures in a kaleidoscopic array of colours sit, dance around, lie back in ecstacy atop long grey formica tabletops which sail into the antique mirrors lining the walls.

A beautiful and tranquil-looking figure from Francis Upritchard’s installation ‘Save Yourself’ for NZ, Venice Biennale, 2009

The power of these colourful characters, made with intricate details, tiny hands and fingernails perfectly crafted, is that they permeate a feeling, from meditation, transcendance to personal bliss, we seem to be witnessing all of them in some state of subtle and personal peacefullness.

Lost in a state of personal bliss- detail of ‘Rested’ figure from Francis Upritchard’s installation ‘Save Yourself’ for NZ, Venice Biennale, 2009

The figures don’t look at us but turn their gazes inwards in some form of compelling transcendence, you can’t help feeling beckoned to join them.
Francis Upritchard explains the subject-matter of her work herself:

“…like dark ages craft adjusted and repainted by some futurist revolutionary caught in a wild dream.”

‘Richard’ from Francis Upritchard’s installation ‘Save Yourself’ for NZ, Venice Biennale, 2009

Amongst Wolfgang Tillmans’ works exhibited this year are beautiful single chroma-coloured photographs hung simply tacked onto the walls in deftly colour-coordinated clusters spanning the gallery corners.

Wolfgang Tillmans at the Venice Biennale, 2009

Also in rows behind Perspex vitrines folded, crumpled and scored chroma-coloured photogrphs form colourful sequences.

Wolfgang Tillmans at the Venice Biennale, 2009

What these photos were of it was impossible to know but you got the sense that you were looking at a detail of something that had been ‘photographed’ as opposed to just a randomly chosen block of colour and part if the enjoyment seemed in deciphering what these close-ups might come from. Your mind can’t help wondering what the image would be if you zoomed out to see the full picture.

Cildo Meireles in the Arsenale presents a series of chroma-coloured walk-through installation. Over a sequence of five rooms, you journey through orange, yellow, green to violet to blue, each room with an enticing doorway giving a sneak into the next saturated super-colour.

Cildo Meireles’ walk-in installation at ‘Making Worlds’, the Venice Biennale, 2009

The corner of each room at eye-level houses a monitor playing what seems to be a view of the corner behind the monitor, but as we move, the colour flicks to one discordant to that of the room, so orange on blue and yellow on green. As a development from his original ‘Red Shift’ installation from 1967-1984, where the red colour theme of the room is made of a myriad of found objects, all in the same hue of red, this work is like climbing into a techno-rainbow, boxed by Tadao Ando. Your mind can’t help responding to the super-saturated brightness of the colours; effective chroma-therapy for the jaded art traveller.

Our final stop away from the main trail of the Biennale was at the Punta della Dogana, the much anticipated second location of the Palazzo Grassi on the tip of the lagoon on the Grand Canal. Squeezing itself literally into every last inch of it’s triangular plot on the tip of the lagoon on the Grand Canal, Guiseppe Benomi’s 17th century Venetian Customs House has been transformed into a double-height shrine to the very best of contemporary art. ‘Mapping the Studio’ the current exhibition there curated by Francesco Bonami and Alison Gingeras sets the personal art collection of the French magnate Francois Pinault (the man behind the Gucci Group) against the waterside views of Venice. And it literally feels like you are walking through a collection of the best art in the world.

Matthew Day-Jackson’s skull piece at the Punta della Dogana, Palazzo Grassi’s amazing new alternative space at the Venice Biennale, 2009

Amongst the amazingly colour-saturated glossy pictures of Piotr Uklanski and the classics such as Sherman and Koons, our favourite was the work of the relative newcomer Matthew Day-Jackson. A row of wax sculls along a series of shelves morph as they progress upwards through the colours of the rainbow from realistic skulls to gradually more hybridised faceted volumes.

A duo of highly engineered polished cases with glass fronts and infinity mirror backgrounds display two hybrid-skeletons. Certain selected elements of the bone structures have been replaces such as the ribcage is now a series of polished brass coils. Unfortunately, photography of the collection was strictly forbidden (and strictly enforced!) so we were unable to picture this work. The work however, feels totally fresh and part of a new colourful movement of artists adding a metallic, psychedelic twist to classic celebration of the dark and macabre.

Haegue Yang’s ‘Symmetric Inequality’ installation inside the Korean pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2009

Bridging our step from colour to works on an interior scale is Haegue Yang’s ‘Symmetric Inequality’ installation inside the Korean pavilion at the Giardini. Made from a series of multi-coloured blinds constructed the pseudo open dwelling, part hut, part temple flutters in the breeze as the fans surrounding it sporadically turned on and off.

One of more quirky installations but one we loved was Chu Yun’s ‘Constellation’, also at the Arsenale. Described as ‘various household appliances divorced from their usual setting’, Yun has created a miasma of flashing, flickering twinkling lights from a landscape of objects whose LED lights flash on standby.

A modern-day cosmos of domestic white goods/ white Gods Chu Yun’s installation ‘Constellation’ at the Arsenale, Venice Biennale, 2009

Howard and Tom were lucky enough to catch the installations and performances of these other artists: Liam Gillick’s installation, Ttéia 1 | C’ by Brazilian artist Lygia Pape | The Scottish pavillion and Palazzo Pisani with the work of Dundee-based artist Martin Boyce | The work of Yoko Ono | and Charles Ray’s “Boy With Frog”.

See the additional coverage. More on Kate MacGarry & Francis Upritchard.

Photos & Content © Howard Sullivan