The versatile Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson is currently exhibiting in Milan at the Riccardo Crespi Gallery as part of a performance project by Marianna Vacellio. We quote the gallery's web page:

The work Hot Shame - the Quest of Shelley’s Heart by Ragnar Kjartansson (1976, Iceland) is a camouflage in a camouflage: a space of reality with which the artist decided to play until completely vanishing. Kjartansson chooses a legend, the one on the burial of the heart separated from body by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English Romantic poet.

There are different positions about this, the rest talks about an out-and-out research: the artist isn’t interested in the truth of the fact as much as the collection of romanticism, death and eternity that the story may suggest, and creating around that, an elegy, narrating the memory of a memory, and transforming the gallery space into an act of devotion to the bleeding heart, bleeds because it is wounded, or simply because, for Kjartansson, “life is sad and beautiful…I love life, I love its desperation.”

The artist defines the installations as tableaux vivants, a place where different disciplines collide, where repeating in a sort of loop, grotesque and dreaming, for hours, days, the performance; playing with the works’ temporal dimensions to enter and exit itself, until in every single taking over diverse contingent possibilities and the spectator, invited to carry out a fulfilment at the outside, confuse with themselves.