Tim Rollins and K.O.S.

Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Naples
Through May 11

Literature and art are woven together in the pedagogical, socially-involved works that Tim Rollins has been producing since the early ’80s with the “Kids of Survival” (K.O.S.), a sizeable group of mostly Hispanic kids from the South Bronx. Rollins, convinced of the greater worth of group art in relation to the individual’s creative faculty, works with a view to democratizing art. Starting from group readings of various literary classics, the artist stimulates an analysis of the books in question by means of long “jamming” sessions and the sketching of hundreds of drawings, the majority of which are then brought together in group art works.

In this Neapolitan solo show, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. show a series of recent works and a selection of pieces from 1993 inspired by Collodi’s Pinocchio. Pages taken from selected chapters of the famous tale about the wooden puppet, along with ones from Mark Twain and Stephen Crane novels, sermons by Martin Luther King’, and the Divina Commedia, are stuck to the canvas to form a base on which drawings and paintings are carried out.

The images are intended to interact with the chosen text, without necessarily illustrating it. Two large-scale paintings take their inspiration from the nine heavens in the third canticle of Dante’s poem, Paradiso. Nine concentric, celestial circles in white acrylic depict certain moments from the tercets of the first two cantos. A major change in compositional structure is visible in the work executed on the pages of Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, which relates the story of its young hero Fleming. Having faced the “test of fire” in the American Civil War, and lived through the battlefield experience, Fleming finally gains courage.

Small weapons and multicolored stars are applied to a chapter of Crane’s novel to symbolize incidents that kids of the K.O.S. have either lived through or experienced indirectly, metaphors for the wounds that have been inflicted on their bodies and on those of so many South Bronx adolescents. Their lives are thus woven into their art.

All the works display a perfect formal balance between typographical and pictorial elements. Never excessive, the effect is nonetheless highly emotive and draws the viewer in, which would seem to reflect perfectly the experience that Rollins has been having for so many years with the “Kids of Survival”.




Francesco Galdieri
Translation by Rosalind Furness