Let’s Not Be Honest / NEUTRO

On the occasion of its opening, NEUTRO presents Let’s Not Be Honest, a site-specific installation by The Cool Couple.
NEUTRO is an uncommon exhibition space that invites contemporary artists to develop an installation for its peculiar location. Six commercial windows in the main street of Reggio Emilia become a display under the constant and unpredictable gaze of the public.
The first exhibition, Let’s Not Be Honest, is a reflection on the relationship between privacy, the construction of the image of ourselves and the outside world in a screen-based society, themes recurring in the artists’ research.
The Cool Couple decided to put up on the notice boards six photographic backdrops that they had bought on Amazon. Victorian libraries, Caribbean beaches, all different subjects that have recently appeared in some of our houses to overcome the lack of fancy rooms during the many video calls that filled our lives in the past months, invading our private space.
Then all of the windows showing the backdrops have been vandalized in the most conventional way: writings and slogans have been spray-painted or drawn with markers all over them, creating a short circuit between passers-by and everyday life images, suggesting a discussion on the reliability of one’s digital presence.
Together with this project, NEUTRO has published a series of 50 pieces which tell the duo’s intervention; it is accompanied by an insight where Stefano Volpato proposes an analysis on the trespassing from public to private life, from reality to surreality.