GARETH PUGH VIDEO REVIEW BY ANNA BATTISTA

A truncated military tower, Orsanmichele  is the oddest-looking church in Florence. The first building erected on this site was a small oratory secreted in the orchard of vegetable garden (orto) of a Benedictine monastery and open loggia with a grain warehouse upstairs. A larger church stood on the site from the 9th century, San Michele ad Hortum or San Michele in Orte (contracted in Orsanmichele).

Text By Anna Battista

The church was replaced by a grain market in the 13th century but the place retained its religious associations. Giovanni Villani, a chronicler, wrote indeed in the 1300s that “The lame walked and the possessed were liberated”, after visiting a miracuolous image of the Virgin painted on one of the market pillars.

Last Thursday Gareth Pugh presentation his latest video at the Pitti event organised inside the Orsanmichele church. Upon entering the ground floor the visitors were introduced to a room with a giant golden cube hanging from the ceiling surrounded by the impressive 1300s restored statues that once filled the niches of the building and that were built with the money of the rising middle class of merchants and their guilds.

The setting was supposed to create contrasts between the modern, futuristic and mysterious golden cube and the ancient statues, such as Nanni di Banco’s Quattro Coronati, Donatello’s St George and St Mark, a gothic Madonna and Child, Ghiberti’s John The Baptist and Verrocchio’s Christ and Thomas.

After going up several flight of stairs, visitors reached the top floor where a new film directed by Ruth Hogben was projected onto two screens hanging from the ceiling.The film featured models in Gareth Pugh designs interspersed with shots of a group of dancers and called to mind the video that accompanied Pugh’s S/S 11 collection.

Screened in two different sessions, the film was cleverly shot and assembled, showing a sort of obsessive phantasmatic vision based on a main dichotomy, abstraction Vs physicality, and accompanied by Matthew Stone’s dramatic score.

Yet, though seductive and sensorial, this hypnotic barrage of images left you rather cold. The mini-collection Pugh created for this event – was comprising six designs revoling around a basic palette of black, cobalt blue and gold allegedly referencing art, architecture, religious iconography and Florence.

A neoprene coat with angular tails with a matching suit, a mini-dress with gloves covered in gold scales plus a theatrical headdress, armbands and shoes in the designer’s trademark triangular pattern, were typical Pugh designs.

The designer also mentioned Caravaggio among his influences, though the only reference to the painter was in the use of chiaroscuro in the video that actually displayed in the final images showing the dancers forming statuesque groups some connections with Pontormo’s figure groups.